The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton: With an Essay on the Life and Writings of Thomas Nash by Edmund GosseNash, Thomas
General
The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton: With an Essay on the Life and Writings of Thomas Nash by Edmund Gosse
Nash, Thomas
Adventure stories; Travelers -- Fiction
It is to be regretted that Nash made no second adventure in pure
fiction. "Jack Wilton," now one of the rarest of his books, was never
reprinted in its own age.
How Nash was employed during the next two years, it is not easy to
conjecture. When we meet with him once more, the smouldering fire of his
quarrel with the Harveys had burst again into flame. "Have with you to
Saffron Walden," 1596, is devoted to the chastisement of "the reprobate
brace of brothers, to wit, witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." No
fresh public outburst on Harvey's part seems to have led to this
attack; but he bragged in private that he had silenced his licentious
antagonists. Nash admits that his opponent's last book "has been kept
idle by me, in a bye-settle out of sight amongst old shoes and boots
almost this two year." Harvey was known to have come from Saffron
Walden; Nash invites his readers to accompany him to that town to see
what they can discover, and he retails a good deal of lively scandal
about the rope-maker's sons. "Have with you" is perhaps the smartest and
is certainly the most readable of Nash's controversial volumes. It gives
us, too, some interesting fragments of autobiography. Harvey had accused
him of "prostituting his pen like a courtisan," and Nash makes this
curious and not very lucid statement in selfdefence:--
"Neither will I deny it nor will I grant it. Only thus far I'll go with
you, that twice or thrice in a month, when _res est angusta domi_, the
bottom of my purse is turned downward, and my conduit of ink will no
longer flow for want of reparations, I am fain to let my plough stand
still in the midst of a furrow, and follow some of these newfangled
Galiardos and Senior Fantasticos, to whose amorous _villanellas_ and
_quipassas_, I prostitute my pen in hope of gain.... Many a fair day ago
have I proclaimed myself to the world Piers Penniless."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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