Gabriel Harvey Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Henry Morley

Critical Essay by Henry Morley

SOURCE: Morley, Henry. “Gabriel Harvey.” In Clement Marot and Other Studies, Vol. 1, pp. 229-47. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970.

In the following essay, originally published in 1871, Morley provides an overview of Harvey's life, character, and career.

When, in 1579, their old comrade at Pembroke Hall, Edward Kirke, prefixed to Spenser's first venture in verse, The Shepheardes' Calender, a letter to Gabriel Harvey, as its unnamed author's “special friend and fellow-poet,” he only told in prose what is shown by the Calender itself, where Harvey is enshrined as Spenser's Hobbinol. The difference is great between this Hobbinol as we may see him if we care to look for his true features, and the figure which stands for him in encyclopædias, in text-books, and in that lively account of the paper war between Harvey and Nash which most of us have read with natural enjoyment in Isaac D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors....
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