“Esse putet Boreae triste furentis opus,”

will sweare on a book I have brought him lowe, and shrowdly broken him; which more to confirme, look on his head, and you shall find a gray haire for euery line I have writ against him; and you shall have all his beard white too, by that time he hath read over this booke.  For his stature, he is such another pretie Jacke-a-Lent as boyes throw at in the streete, and lookes in his blacke sute of veluet, like one of these jet-droppes which divers weare at their eares instead of a iewell.  A smudge peice of a handsome fellow it hath been in his dayes, but now he is olde and past his best, and fit for nothing but to be a nobleman’s porter, or a knight of Windsor.”

Nash was so full of invective and personal abuse that he scarcely deserved the name of a satirist, and so great was the animosity with which the quarrel between him and Gabriel Harvey was conducted, that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London issued an order in 1599 that all such books “be taken wheresoever they be found, and that none of the said books be ever printed hereafter.”

His humour was remarkable, as it largely consisted of coining long and almost unintelligible words.  This he laid great store by, and he speaks wrathfully of one who translated his “Piers Penniless,” into what he calls “maccaronical language.”  In his “Lenten Stuffe or Praise of the Red Herring,” i.e., of Great Yarmouth, he calls those who despised Homer in his life-time “dull-pated pennifathers,” and says that “those grey-beard huddle-duddles and crusty cum-twangs were strooke with stinging remorse of their miserable euchonisme and sundgery.”

Peele was one of the gay play-writers to whom Greene addressed his warning.  They seem at this time to have united the professions of dramatist and actor, and to have been infected with that dissipation which has since been attributed with more or less justice to the stage.  Peele is as fond as Greene of surprises and miraculous interventions.  In the “Arraignment of Paris” a golden tree grows up, and in the “Old Wives Tale,” the most humorous of his works, the head of Huanebango rises from a well.  He is fond of dealing in phonetic words Latinisms and barbarisms; in one place he makes Corebus say: 

“O falsum Latinum
The fair maid is minum
Cum apurtinantibus gibletis and all.”

Peele was very popular in his day, and was often called upon to write pieces for the Lord Mayor and for royal receptions.  He sometimes used Hexameter lines such as: 

“Dub, dub-a-dub bounce, quoth the guns with
a sulphurous huff shuff.”

Gabriel Harvey first introduced this metre into English, and he tried to induce Spenser to adopt it.  Nash calls it “that drunken staggering kind of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfeild, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soust vp to the saddle and straight aloft on his tip-toes.”