SOURCE: Wilson, Harold S. Introduction to Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus, translated by Clarence A. Forbes, pp. 1-34. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska, 1945.

In the following essay, Wilson examines Harvey's Ciceronianus, describing its composition, context, contents, purpose, and style.

I

Though Gabriel Harvey was not, like the poet,

A creature quite too bright and good To be so much misunderstood,(1) 

posterity has, on the whole, dealt rather harshly with him. An unwilling participant in a spectacular and amusing but highly undignified flyting with the brilliant Elizabethan journalist, Thomas Nashe, Harvey has commonly been judged from the estimate of his opponent as a dull pedant. But Tom Nashe is a biased witness and quite unfit to judge of Harvey's accomplishments in the learned world of his day. While he was still in his middle twenties,² Harvey distinguished himself at Cambridge as a teacher and one of the University's most accomplished Latinists...