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Although I cannot at this time bring together positive and undoubted evidence of the authorship of the following tract, (because the materials are at present inaccessible to me,) at some future period, in the Introduction to one of his accredited productions, I hope to place the fact beyond the reach of cavil or question, that Thomas Nash, to whom public fame has given it, was the author.

Nash was of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and took his degree of B.A. in 1585. He is supposed to have quitted the university in some disgrace about 1586, but of the cause we are entirely ignorant. The anonymous author of a tract called “Polymanteia,” printed in 1595, thus alludes to it: “Cambridge, make thy two children friends; thou hast been unkind to one [Nash], to wean him before his time, and too fond upon the other [Gabriel Harvey], to keep him so long without preferment; the one is ancient and of small reading; the other is young and full of wit.” Nash himself speaks of his beardless years, in Pierce Penniless; and Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierce’s Supererogation, 1592, calls him “a gosling of the printing house;” and in another place “a proper young man;” and elsewhere, “a young man of the greenest spring, as beardless in judgment as in face:” so that he must have taken his degree of B.A. early in life, and we know that he never proceeded Master of Arts.

It would appear from the Introduction to the following tract that Nash had visited Italy. Mr. Collier, in his Introduction to Nash’s Pierce Penniless [Shakspeare Soc. 1842], says, “We find him [Nash] in London in 1587, in which year he wrote a very amusing and clever introductory epistle to a tract by the celebrated Robert Greene, called ‘Menaphon,’ afterwards better known by the name of ‘Greene’s Arcadia,’ the title it bore in the later impressions. This seems to have been Nash’s earliest appearance in the character of an author” [p. x. xi.], then adding in a note, “We take the date of ‘Greene’s Menaphon,’ 1587, from the edition of that author’s ‘Dramatic Works,’ by the Rev. A. Dyce.” Mr. Collier apparently had forgotten that he had himself stated some years before the fact of the Arcadia having been printed in 1587, “because in Greene’s Euphues, his Censure to Philautus, of the same date, it is mentioned as already in print.” [Hist. English Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii. p. 150.]

Whatever may be the date of the first edition of Greene’s Menaphon, we have here only to do with Nash’s Preface to that work, and, though Sir E. Brydges, in his reprint of it in 1814, mentions 1587, in which he is followed by the Rev. A. Dyce in 1831, [Greene’s Works, II. c. iii], by Mr. Collier above, in the same year, and again in 1842, all agreeing to fix the date of Nash’s Preface in 1587; yet there is, if I mistake not, internal evidence that it could not have been written before the date of the first known edition, which is in 1589.

Of the accuracy of the extraordinary facts which Nash relates in the Introduction to the Almond for a Parrot [pp. 5, 6], I had expected to find confirmation in some book of travels of the time, but in this have not succeeded.

Nash, in his Preface to Menaphon, addressed “To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities,” evidently referring to the Puritans, mentions, “the most poisonous Pasquils any dirty-mouthed Martin or Momus ever composed;” of their “spitting ergo in the mouth of every one they meet;” and, unless I am mistaken, the following refers to Penry: “But when the irregular idiot, that was up to the ears in divinity before ever he met with probabile in the university, shall leave pro et contra before he can scarcely pronounce it, and come to correct commonweals that never heard of the name of magistrate before he came to Cambridge, it is no marvel if every alehouse vaunt the table of the world turned upside down, since the child beateth his father, and the ass whippeth his master.” [Reprint of Menaphon, in Archaica, Pref. xiii., 4to, 1814.] The allusions in the whole sentence can only be explained by referring them to Martin Mar-Prelate’s “Epistle,” “Epitome,” &c., which were printed in 1588.

Secondly, Nash says, “It may be my Anatomy of Absurdities may acquaint you ere long with my skill in surgery.” Now, the Anatomy of Absurdities came out in 1589, and the expression “ere long” would scarcely apply had this been written in 1587.

Thirdly, he says, “If I please, I will think my ignorance indebted unto you that applaud it, if not, what rests but that I be excluded from your courtesy, like Apocrypha from your Bibles?”

This passage appears to refer to a fact which Martin Mar-Prelate states in his Epistle to the Terrible Priests. [Reprint, p. 4.] “The last lent [he is writing in 1588] there came a commaundement from his grace into Paules Church Yard, that no Byble should be bounde without the Apocripha.” Strype, in his Life of Archbishop Whitgift, admits the order, and takes some pains to justify the Archbishop in issuing it. [See Strype’s Whitgift, i. 590.—Cooper’s Admonition, 1589.]

The foregoing inferences, however, are confirmed by the fact that there is an allusion in this Preface to a work which did not appear until 1589. Nash, in giving the roll of English Worthies, introduces the following passage: “I will not say but we had a Haddon, whose pen would have challenged the laurel from Homer; together with Car, that came as near him as Virgil to Theocritus. But Thomas Newton, with his Leiland, and Gabriel Harvey, with two or three other, is almost all the store that is left us at this hour.” [Pref. to Menaphon, xviii.]

As Newton’s Leiland is a work of unfrequent occurrence, I subjoin the title at length: “Principum, ac illustrium aliquot & eruditorum in Anglia virorum, Encomia, Trophæa, Genethliaca & Epithalamia. A Joanne Lelando Antiquario conscripta, nunc primùm in lucem edita. Quibus etiarn adiuncta sunt, Illustrissimorum aliquot Herôum, hodiè viventium, aliorúmq; hinc indè Anglorum, Encomia et Evlogia: à Thoma Newtono Cestreshyrio, succisiuis horulis exarata. Londini, apud Thomam Orwinum, Typographum. 1589,” in 4to. This work may also contain internal evidence, in addition to the statement in the title-page, that it was first published in 1589. There is a poem at p. 122, “Ad Chr. Oclandum de Elizabetheide sua,” which may refer to the first part of Ocland’s Elizabetheis, which came out in 1582, but most probably refers to the second part, printed by Thomas Orwin, in 1589.

I should not have taken the trouble to investigate the contents of this Preface of Nash, “the firstlings of my folly,” as he calls it himself [p. xxi], with such minuteness, but that it establishes beyond question the fact that Nash commenced his literary career in 1589, and not, as is generally supposed, in 1587.

In the following Introduction, Nash says, “For comming from Venice the last summer, and taking Bergamo in my waye homeward to England.” Now as he afterwards alludes to the appearance of Martin Mar-prelate in England, and also to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, “neither Philip by his power,” this most probably was the latter part of the summer of 1588, and if he arrived in England towards the end of 1588, there would be both time and opportunity for him to write the various works, which, published in 1589, are attributed to him. There is every probability, therefore, that Nash did visit Italy, that he was there in 1588, and that, returning to England with his mind enlarged by travel, he commenced his short, but remarkable career in literature, which, after he had undergone the painful vicissitudes to which authors by profession have so often been subjected,

“Since none takes pitie of a scholler’s neede,”

was terminated by his death in 1601.

I shall not here enumerate the various works which Nash wrote, because an opportunity will offer, in the Introduction to one of his publications, to notice the whole of them.

Whatever was the origin of the long and bitter quarrel between Nash and Gabriel Harvey, from this passage in the Preface to Menaphon, 1589, “and Gabriel Harvey, with two or three other, is almost all the store that is left us at this hour,” we may reasonably infer that it was not in existence then. The origin, progress, and effect of this quarrel, which included Lyly, Greene, Nash, and the three Harveys, and the right understanding of which is necessary to elucidate the progress of the Martin Mar-Prelate Controversy, I hope to give in the Introduction to “Plaine Percevall the Peace-Maker of England,” a tract uniformly attributed to Nash; but which he, in one of his publications, not only utterly disclaims, but charges it upon one of his most hated antagonists.

The internal evidence in favour of Nash, as the author of the Almond for a Parrot, is very strong; and cannot but appear to any one who is conversant with his “Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem,” a work containing more remarkable passages than any publication of the time that has ever fallen in my way. The description of Penry, at p. 39, beginning, “Where, what his estimation was,” &c.; but more especially the paragraph at p. 21, beginning, “Talke as long as you will of the Ioyes of heaven,” &c., may be compared with several passages in “Christ’s Tears” wherein Nash describes the horrors endured by its inhabitants during the siege of Jerusalem.

With respect to the title “An Almond for a Parrat,” the meaning appears obvious; it is evidently a cant term, and like “A Sop to Cerberus,” means a stopper for the mouth. Mr. Halliwell, in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, calls it “a kind of proverbial expression,” but does not attempt to trace its origin. It is used by Skelton [Works by Dyce, ii. 4], by Webster [Works, iii. 122], and by Middleton [Works, iii. 112].

The original, from which the present tract is reprinted, is a small 4to, printed in black letter, consisting altogether of 28 pages. The “Protestation” is referred to at p. 11, “Pap with a Hatchet,” at p. 12, and “Hay any worke for a Cooper,” at p. 15, by which it is certain that its publication was subsequent to them, and may perhaps be referred to the latter end of the year 1589.

J. P.

London,

Nov. 28th, 1845.

An Almond for a Parrat,

Or

Cutbert Curry-knaues

Almes.

Fit for the knaue Martin, and the

rest of those impudent Beggers, that can not be content to stay their stomakes with a Benefice, but they will needes breake their fastes with our Bishops.

Rimarum sum plenus.

Therefore beware (gentle Reader) you

catch not the hicket with laughing.

Imprinted at a Place, not farre from a

Place, by the Assignes of Signior Some-body, and

are to be sold at his shoppe in Trouble-knaue

Street, at the signe of the

Standish.