"[At Cambridge], (being distracted of his wits) [Nash] fell into diverse misdemeanours, which were the first steps that brought him to this poor estate. As, namely, in his fresh-time, how he flourished in all impudency towards scholars, and abuse to the townsmen; insomuch that to this day the townsmen call every untoward scholar of whom there is great hope, _a very Nash_. Then, being bachelor of arts, which by great labour he got, to show afterwards that he was not unworthy of it, had a hand in a show called _Terminus et non terminus_; for the which his partner in it was expelled the college; but this foresaid Nash played in it (as I suppose) the Varlet of Clubs.... Then suspecting himself that he should be stayed for _egregie dunsus_, and not attain to the next degree, said he had commenced enough, and so forsook Cambridge, being bachelor of the third year." But, even in this poor gossip, we find nothing about ejection. Nash's extraordinary abuse of language is probably the cause of that report. In 1589, in prefacing his "Anatomy of Absurdity," he remarked:-- "What I have written proceeded not from the pen of vainglory, but from the process of that pensiveness, which two summers since overtook me; whose obscured cause, best known to every name of curse, hath compelled my wit to wander abroad unregarded in this satirical disguise, and counselled my content to dislodge his delight from traitors' eyes." That the young gentleman meant something by these sentences, it is only charitable to suppose; that he could have been intelligible, even to his immediate contemporaries, is hardly to be believed. This "obscured cause" has been taken to be, by some, his removal from the University, and, by others, his entanglement with a young woman. It is perhaps simpler to understand him to say that the ensuing pamphlet was written, in consequence of an intellectual crisis, in 1587, when he was twenty years of age.