Gabriel Harvey
Henry Morley, writing in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), has argued that Harvey's Latin works demonstrate that he was distinguished by qualities very different from the pedantry and conceit usually associated with his name.
In a letter to "M. Immerito" (Edmund Spenser) Harvey says that Edward Dyer and Philip Sidney were helping forward "our new famous enterprise for the exchanging of Barbarous and Balductum Rymes with Artificial Verses."
The letter includes a tepid appreciation of Spenser's Faerie Queene which had been sent to him for his opinion, and he gives examples of English hexameters illustrative of the principles enunciated in the correspondence.
"He (Harvey) goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another," says Nashe in Strange Newes, and he mimics him in the mocking couplet: "But ah !
He became reader in rhetoric in about 1576, and in 1578, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Sir Thomas Smith at Audley End House, he was appointed to dispute publicly before her.
In the next year he wrote to Spenser complaining of the unauthorized publication of satirical verses of his which were supposed to reflect on high personages, and threatened seriously to injure his career.
Gabriel's brother, Richard Harvey, had taken part in the Martin Marprelate controversy, and had given offence to Robert Greene by contemptuous references to him and his fellow wits.
Greene retorted by inserting a few lines in the first edition of his A Quip for an Upstart Courtier containing scathing remarks on the four Harvey brothers, drawing attention, among other things, to the fact that they were the sons of a ropemaker.
In a religious work, Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593) Nashe made a full apology to Harvey, who however resumed the controversy in a New Letter of Notable Contents (1593).
He refused to take reports of Nashe's change of heart at face value until he had the proof in black and white: This certainly sounds as if Harvey had simply not seen a copy of Christs Teares at the time of writing New Letter.
William Hazlitt, 1871); John Payne Collier's Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865), and the Works of Thomas Nashe.
