In London Nash became acquainted with Robert Greene, and their friendship drew him into a long literary contest with Gabriel Harvey, to which Nash owes much of his reputation.  It arose out of the posthumous attack of Harvey upon Robert Greene, of which sufficient mention has been made elsewhere.  Nash replied on behalf of his dead companion, and reiterated the charge which had given the original offence to Harvey, viz., that his brother was the son of a ropemaker.[7] One piece was humorously dedicated to Richard Litchfield, a barber of Cambridge, and Harvey answered it under the assumed character of the same barber, in a tract called “The Trimmino of Thomas Nash,"[8] which also contained a woodcut of a man in fetters.  This representation referred to the imprisonment of Nash for an offence he gave by writing a play (not now extant) called “The Isle of Dogs,” and to this event Francis Meres alludes in his “Palladia Tamia,” 1598, in these terms:  “As Actaeon was worried of his own hounds, so is Tom Nash of his ‘Isle of Dogs.’  Dogs were the death of Euripides; but be not disconsolate, gallant young Juvenal; Linus, the son of Apollo, died the same death.  Yet God forbid, that so brave a wit should so basely perish!—­Thine are but paper dogs; neither is thy banishment like Ovid’s eternally to converse with the barbarous Getes.  Therefore comfort thyself, sweet Tom, with Cicero’s glorious return to Rome, and with the council Aeneas gives to his sea-beaten soldiers.”  Lib.  I. Aeneid.

    “Pluck up thine heart, and drive from thence both fear and care away: 
    To think on this may pleasure be, perhaps, another day.”

    —­Durato, et temet rebus servato secundis. (fol. 286.)

This was in part verified in the next year, for when Nash published his “Lenten Stuff,” he referred with apparent satisfaction to his past troubles in consequence of his “Isle of Dogs."[9]

So much has been said, especially by Mr D’Israeli in his “Quarrels of Authors,” on the subject of this dispute between Nash and Harvey, that it is unnecessary to add anything, excepting that it was carried to such a length, and the pamphlets contained so much scurrility, that it was ordered from authority in 1599 that all the tracts on both sides should be seized and suppressed.[10]

As with Greene, so with Nash, an opinion on his moral conduct and general deportment has been too readily formed from the assertions of his opponents; and because Gabriel Harvey, to answer a particular purpose, states, “You may be in one prison to-day and in another to-morrow,” it has been taken for granted, that “after his arrival in London, he was often confined in different jails.”  No doubt, he and his companions Greene, Marlowe, and Peele, led very disorderly lives, and it is singular that all four died prematurely, the oldest of them probably not being forty years of age.  It is certain that Nash was not living at the time when the “Return from Parnassus”