An excellent English and Latin poet, equally well known as the friend of Spenser and as the enemy of Nash, was educated at Christ’s College and at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in 1585 became Doctor of Laws. The following are his principal English publications:—“Three proper and wittie Familiar Letters: lately passed betweene two Vniuersitie Men,” Lon., 1580, 4to…. The University men were himself and Edmund Spenser. 2. “Fovre Letters and certaine Sonnets,” 1592, 4to…. This contains many literary notices of his contemporaries, and is therefore of great value to the antiquary. 3. “Pierces Supererogation; or, a new Prayse of the Old Asse,” 1593, 4to. 4. “A New Letter of Notable Contents,” 1593.
To the Worshipfull his Very Singular Good Friend, Maister G. H…. Good Master G. I perceiue by your most curteous and frendly Letters your good will to be no lesse in deed, than I alwayes esteemed. In recōpence whereof, think I beseech you, that I wil spare neither speech, nor wryting, nor aught else, whensoeuer, and wheresoeuer occasion shal be offred me: yea, I will not stay, till it be offred, but will seeke it, in al that possibly I may. And that you may perceiue how much your Counsel in al things preuaileth with me, and how altogither I am ruled and ouer-ruled thereby: I am now determined to alter mine owne former purpose, and to subscribe to your aduizemēt: being nothwithstāding resolued stil, to abide your farther resolution.
Now I trust, M. Harvey, that upon sight of your speciall frends and fellow Poets doings, or els for envie of so many unworthy Quidams, which catch at the garlond which to you alone is dewe, you will be perswaded to pluck out of the hateful darknesse those so many excellent English poemes of yours which lye hid, and bring them forth to eternall light. Trust me, you doe both them great wrong, in depriving them of the desired sonne; and also your selfe, in smoothering your deserved prayses; and all men generally, in withholding from them so divine pleasures, which they might conceive of your gallant English verses, as they have already doen of your Latine Poemes, which, in my opinion, both for invention and Elocution are very delicate and superexcellent. And thus againe I take my leave of my good Mayster Harvey: from my lodging at London thys 10. of Aprill, 1579.
Therefore wyll I aduenture to sette them together, as two of the rarest witts, and learnedst masters of Poetrie in England. Whose worthy and notable skyl in this faculty, I would wysh if their high dignities and serious businesses would permit, they would styll graunt to bee a furtheraunce to that reformed kinde of Poetry, which Master Haruey did once beginne to ratify: and surely in mine opinion, if hee had chosen some grauer matter, and handled but with halfe that skyll, which I knowe he could haue doone, and not powred it foorth at a venture, as a thinge betweene iest and earnest, it had taken greater effect then it did.
A proverb it is, as stale as sea-biefe, save a thief from the gallows and hee’le be the first to shew thee the way to Saint Gilesesse. Harvey I manifestly saved from the knot under the eare: Verily, he had hanged him selfe had I gone forwards in my vengeance; but, I know not how, upon his prostrate intreatie, I was content to give him a short Psalme of mercy. Now, for reprieving him when he was ripe for execution, thus he requites me. Sixe and thirty sheets of mustard-pot paper since that hath he published against me…. Some few crummes of my booke hath he confuted: all the rest of his invention is nothing but an oxe with a pudding in his bellie…. Maister Lillie, poore deceasses Kit Marlow, reverent Doctor Perne, with a hundred other quiet senselesse carcasses before the Conquest departed, in the same worke he hath most notoriously and vilely dealt with; and, to conclude, he hath proved him selfe to be the only Gabriel Grave-digger under heaven.
This person, who made a great noise in his time, was born at Saffron-walden in Essex; and tho’ his father was a ropemaker as Thomas Nash, a great scoffer, and his antagonist, tells us, yet he had rich kindred and was nearly allied to Sir Thomas Smith, the great statesman in Queen Elizabeth’s reign.
Of this writer, so well known in his time, the author of many respectable works, and of no inferior accomplishments in learning or talents, very imperfect accounts are to be found in any of our biographical compilations. He certainly deserves a place among the national records of his countrymen.
An author of considerable rank…. Harvey was a pedant, but pedantry was part of the erudition of an age when our national literature was passing from its infancy; he introduced hexameter verses into our language, and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practised till it was found sufficiently ridiculous. His style was infected with his pedantic taste; and the hard outline of his satirical humour betrays the scholastic cynic, not the airy and fluent wit. He had, perhaps, the foibles of a man who was clearing himself from obscurity; he prided himself on his family alliances, while he fastidiously looked askance on the trade of his father—a rope-manufacturer. He was somewhat rich in his apparel, according to the rank in society he held; and, hungering after the notice of his friends, they fed him on soft sonnet and relishing dedication, till Harvey ventured to publish a collection of panegyrics on himself—and thus gravely stepped into a niche erected to Vanity.
He was a profound scholar, and no inelegant composer of verses: some of his productions evince great learning and research; and though it is impossible to admire his hobbling English hexameters (of which he pompously proclaimed himself the inventor), we cannot read his lines prefixed to “The Faerie Queene” without acknowledging their beauty.
A dry hard student, full of caustic wit, but not lacking, when the humor took him, grace and tenderness. He hurled fierce, stinging words in profusion at any one with whom he chanced to be offended, but to all who pleased him he was a warm and helpful friend. His genius was wasted in his efforts to naturalize the hexameter and other classical metres in English, and of this idle attempt he claimed to be the originator.
He did not become a great man, or what he called “a megalander;” we may, if we will, class him with what is fossil or extinct in literature—its megatherium or dodo. But in his day he worked hard, aspired nobly, and left witness to his labour and his aspiration. Perhaps we do not care, for his own sake, to read the evidence, but set him aside as one of the small matters, if any there be, in which it is not worth while to be just. Then let him have the advantage of being not merely Gabriel Harvey, although to him that was something, but also Spenser’s Hobbinol, which is to us more. He was, during some important years of Spenser’s life, the poet’s “long-approved and singular good friend” and counsellor. The counsel was outgrown, but not the friendship. To our credence as well as Harvey’s, Spenser has left what he once called “the eternal memory of our everlasting friendship, the inviolable memory of our unspotted friendship, the sacred memory of our vowed friendship;” and it is a little due perhaps to Spenser that we should ascertain how much credit is due to the commentators who would have us think that he wrote in this way to a conceited pedant seven years older than himself.
Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining influence of classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in his overweening vanity explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of emphasis with which he insists on all the world’s knowing that Nash had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of the most comic touches in the character of Dogberry.
Except to students of Elizabethan literary history, he has become an utterly obscure personage; and he has not usually been spoken of with much respect.
Of no contemporary of equal notoriety in men’s mouths over so many years, do we know so little as of him. The Damascus blade of Thomas Nashe wounded him mortally. He was speedily forgotten—though he lived on to an unusual age; and no one seems to have cared to rescue his memory from its swift and inexorable oblivion. Even his academic course is obscure and dateless. We have had to wait for these long centuries to learn the chief facts of it contained in his (so-called) “Letter-Book.”
He was emphatically of Mr. Carlyle’s “acrid-quack” genus.
He was a man of arrogant and censorious spirit, far too conscious of his own considerable abilities, while but little disposed to recognise the merits and claims of others…. An overweening estimate of his own attainments and abilities, conjoined with disappointed ambition, seems to have rendered Harvey singularly sensitive and quarrelsome; and to his contemporaries he was best known by the scurrilous paper warfare in which he became involved with the writers Nashe and Greene.
