Alfarache_. [SN: _Nash and the pamphleteers._] Thomas Nash was himself perhaps intrinsically the most able, and certainly not the least typical, member of a whole class of Elizabethan men of letters. He was born at Lowestoft, “a son of the manse,” in 1567, and was educated at St John’s, Cambridge. It has been supposed on the strength of some passages in his writings that he travelled abroad in his youth, though he does not write in his _Unfortunate Traveller_ like a man who had seen Venice and Rome. He was settled in London by 1588, and lived the very necessitous life of a man of letters who depended wholly on his pen, till his early death in 1601. It was the misfortune of Nash and of many of his contemporaries that they were born too soon for the magazine or newspaper. His work consists mainly of matter written to please prevailing tastes of the time. _Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem_, a long, wordy, and decidedly pretentious collection of preachment, and denunciation of the sins of London, his violent quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, or rather with the whole Harvey family, which was rolled out in pamphlets for the amusement of the world, his collection of ghost stories, _The Terrors of the Night_, and what he called _Toys for Gentlemen_, which are lost, and into the nature of which it is perhaps better not to inquire, were journalism before its time. His _Have with you to Saffron Walden_, a piece of vigorous literary horseplay at the expense of Gabriel Harvey, is an excellent pamphlet of its kind--in the kind of Mr Pott and Mr Slurk; while his burlesque almanac, called _A wonderful strange and miraculous Astronomical Prognostication_, though undoubtedly suggested by Rabelais, and therefore not quite original, is a piece of solemn fun worthy of the irony and the good sense of Swift. Nash had ideas of style which sometimes led him into involved pomposity, but which also supplied him with an effective, though blackguard, controversial manner. Nobody was a greater master of loud-mouthed bragging, of the fashion of telling an opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful things you are going to do with him. Consciously, or unconsciously, the Elizabethans were great believers in the maxim that if you throw mud enough some will stick, and it was one of the signs of their youth and primitive simplicity of nature that when they were angry they gave way to the instinct which leads men to scream vituperation and curses, with no regard to their application to the subject. To call a very eminent man on his trial for treason--and on the most flimsy evidence too--“a spider of hell” would now be thought not less silly than ignoble. But that is what Coke called Raleigh, and it is a very fair specimen of Elizabethan satirical controversy. Around Nash was a whole class of men engaged in the same work of writing little stories--pastoral or euphuistic--and pamphlets moral, satirical, political, which were often in verse.