Puritan Discipline Tracts.
AN ALMOND FOR A PARROT;
BEING
A REPLY
TO
MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.
Re-printed from the Black Letter Edition,
WITH
AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES.
LONDON:
JOHN PETHERAM, 71, CHANCERY LANE.
1846.
Although I cannot at this time bring together positiveand undoubted evidence of the authorship of the followingtract, (because the materials are at present inaccessibleto me,) at some future period, in the Introductionto one of his accredited productions, I hope toplace 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, andtook his degree of B.A. in 1585. He is supposed tohave quitted the university in some disgrace about1586, but of the cause we are entirely ignorant. Theanonymous author of a tract called “Polymanteia,”printed in 1595, thus alludes to it: “Cambridge, makethy two children friends; thou hast been unkind toone [Nash], to wean him before his time, and too fond[iv]upon the other [Gabriel Harvey], to keep him so longwithout preferment; the one is ancient and of smallreading; the other is young and full of wit.” Nashhimself 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;” andin another place “a proper young man;” and elsewhere,“a young man of the greenest spring, as beardless injudgment as in face:” so that he must have taken hisdegree of B.A. early in life, and we know that he neverproceeded Master of Arts.
It would appear from the Introduction to the followingtract that Nash had visited Italy. Mr. Collier, inhis Introduction to Nash’s Pierce Penniless [ShakspeareSoc. 1842], says, “We find him [Nash] in London in1587, in which year he wrote a very amusing and cleverintroductory epistle to a tract by the celebrated RobertGreene, called ‘Menaphon,’ afterwards better knownby the name of ‘Greene’s Arcadia,’ the title it borein the later impressions. This seems to have beenNash’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 thatauthor’s ‘Dramatic Works,’ by the Rev. A. Dyce.”Mr. Collier apparently had forgotten that he had[v]himself stated some years before the fact of the Arcadiahaving been printed in 1587, “because in Greene’sEuphues, his Censure to Philautus, of the same date, itis mentioned as already in print.” [Hist. EnglishDramatic Poetry, vol. iii. p. 150.]
Whatever may be the date of the first edition ofGreene’s Menaphon, we have here only to do withNash’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, inthe same year, and again in 1842, all agreeing to fixthe date of Nash’s Preface in 1587; yet there is, if Imistake not, internal evidence that it could not havebeen written before the date of the first known edition,which is in 1589.
Of the accuracy of the extrao