now pledged to the study of the law, he found time for the occasional exercise of his poetical talent, and in 1579 we find him accusing his friend Spenser of publishing some of his attempts at English verse (which he designates his ‘Verlayes’) quite contrary to his own wishes. His enemy, Thomas Nashe [q. v.], declares that Harvey sent them to press himself: ‘I durst on my credit,’ he says, ‘undertake Spenser was no way privie to the committing of them to print.’ However this may have been, it is certain that their publication involved Harvey in serious trouble. Both Sir James Croft and the Earl of Oxford were much displeased at satirical allusions, which seemed to glance at persons high in office at court, and, worst of all, Harvey was supposed by the latter to have aimed at him in his ludicrous description of the ‘Italianated Englishman’ embodied in the ‘Mirror of Tuscanismo’ (Works, ed. Grosart, i. 84). Harvey volunteered an explanation, which was apparently accepted (ib. p. 183), and his friends, Mr. Secretary Wilson and Sir Walter Mildmay, succeeded in averting any serious consequences. It was not until some time afterwards that his enemy, Nashe, asserted that Harvey had actually been sent to the Fleet for writing the verses. Harvey admits that he was mildly remonstrated with by his friend, Dr. Perne; but this, he asserts, was ‘all the Fleeting I ever got.’ That his satire was in any way aimed at the Earl of Oxford he indignantly denies, averring that he had always been conscious of his ‘many bounden duties’ to one who had been his patron ever since ‘in the prime of his gallantest youth he bestowed angels upon me in Christes Colledge in Cambridge.’
His attainments and great ability seem by this time to have been generally recognised. In 1578, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit to the Duke of Norfolk at Audley End, he composed his ‘Gratulationes Waldenses’ in her honour, and presented them to her majesty in person. At the Cambridge commencement of 1579 he was appointed one of the disputants in philosophy. Subsequently, early in 1581, he was a candidate for the office of public orator, but was defeated by Wingfield of Trinity (March 1580–1). Of the event he says: ‘Mine owne modest petition, my friendes diligent labour, our high chauncellors [i.e. Burghley's] most honourable and extraordinary commendation, were all peltingly defeated by a slye practise of the olde Foxe’ (Foure Letters, ed. Grosart, p. 179).
From May to October 1583 (not in 1582 as Brydges says) he filled the office of junior proctor, having been appointed in order to supply the vacancy created by the retirement of Leonard Chambers, who took his B.D. degree in May. There is no grace for the appointment, as Trinity Hall was allowed a first claim on the occurrence of such vacancies, in compensation for its inferior position in relation to the proctorial cycle. On the death of his relative, the master of Trinity Hall, in 1585, Harvey was elected to succeed him, and it was as master of the society that on 2 July 1585 he sought to be incorporated D.C.L. of Oxford, and was licensed to that degree on the 13th of the same month (Oxf. Univ. Reg., Oxf. Hist. Soc., ii. i. 349). According to his own account, his election to the mastership was set aside by royal mandate, although Preston, who was appointed in his place, ‘could,’ he affirms, ‘no way have requested or purchased one voice’ (Works, ed. Grosart, iii. xxvi). In 1598, on Preston's death, he was again a candidate (although no longer a fellow), and in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil entreated his mediation in order that the royal influence might now be exerted in his behalf, but his application was not successful.
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. Greene had been exasperated by contemptuous references made to himself and his friends in the writings of Gabriel's brother Richard [see Harvey, Richard], and he retaliated in his ‘Quippe for an upstart Courtier,’ by calling attention to the Harveys' humble parentage, and by offensive references to their father's trade as a ropemaker. The most galling of these allusions is lost to us, for it was expunged in all the extant editions of Greene's pasquinade (see Greene's Works, ed. Grosart, xi. 206). Harvey was incensed beyond measure, and in his ‘Foure Letters’ (1592) assailed Greene, whose character was sufficiently open to attack, with unsparing acrimony and vituperation. Harvey appended some English verses, including Spenser's noble sonnet addressed to himself. Even after Greene's early and pitiable end in September 1592, he did not desist from endeavouring to blacken his memory, and then it was that Nashe entered the lists against Harvey in defence of his late friend, displaying a power of sarcasm and invective, in the presence of which the haughty scholar found himself completely overmatched. In his ‘Strange News’ (1593) he addresses Harvey as ‘a filthy vain foole;’ proclaims ‘open warres’ upon both him and his brother Richard; ridicules his claim to be
