Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/248

236 N A S N A S with rich embroidery, and drove in a chariot with six greys, laced lackeys, and French horns. Notwithstanding his vanity and impertinence, the tact, energy, and superficial cleverness of Nash won him the patronage and notice of the great, while the success of his ceremonial rule, as shown in the increasing prosperity of the town, secured him the gratitude of the corporation and the people generally. When the Act of Parliament against gambling deprived him of an easy though uncertain means of subsistence, the corporation granted him a pension of six score guineas a year, which, with the sale of his snuff boxes and other trinkets, enabled him to support a certain faded splendour till his death on February 3, 1761. He was honoured with a public funeral at the expense of the town. A Life of Richard Nash, by Goldsmith, was published anony mously at London in 1762, has been frequently reprinted, and is now included in the editions of Goldsmith s collected works. See also London Magazine, vol. xxxi. , and a paper on The Monarch of Bath " in Blackwood s Magazine, vol. xlviii. NASH, THOMAS (c. 1564-1601), poet, playwright, and pamphleteer, was one of the most notable literary celebrities in the brilliant last decade of the reign of Elizabeth. The exact years of his birth and death have not been ascertained ; but from the fact that he proceeded B.A. (St John s, Cambridge) in 1585 it has been con jectured that he was born about 1564, and his death was lamented in an epigram by Fitzgeoffrey in 1601. He tells us himself that his birthplace was Lowestoft. It would seem from a passage in one of his pamphlets that he travelled in Italy after leaving Cambridge, and then he followed the example of Greene and Marlowe, his fellow Cantabs, in trying to make a living by literature in London. Nash was really a journalist born out of due time ; he frequently boasts of his power of writing " as fast as his hand can trot"; his style was brilliant and picturesque ; he had a keen sense of the ridiculous, was quick in argument, and not without abundance of mis cellaneous learning. In the circumstances, there being no market for his gifts, he fared like the other university wits who made the same premature venture at the time to " distil ink into gold," struggled brilliantly for some years, and succumbed. It was as a " notable railer " both against individuals and against the vices and the absurdities of the time, as a man than whom none "used better or more bitter gall in ink," that Nash made his reputation. His first effort was a preface to Greene s Menaphon, in 1587. In this he made boisterous ridicule, with the arrogance of youth and high spirits, of current literature, laughing especially at the bombast of Marlowe s Tamburlaine, and promised to follow up his attack with an Anatomy of Absurditie, which appeared in 1589. Meantime the Marprelate tracts gave him another opening for ridicule, into which he rushed joyously, publishing in quick succes sion Plaine Percevall, Martin s Month s Mind, Pasquil in England, An Almond for a Parrot, Pasquil s Apology. Then he edited Sidney s poems, with a preface, in 1591. Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Devill, published in 1592, at once shows his power as a gaily humorous critic of national manners and lets us into the secret of the hardness of his struggle to live by the pen. It seems to Pierce a monstrous thing that cautious brainless drudges and knaves wax fat " when as the seven liberal sciences and a good leg will scarce get a scholar bread and cheese." A patron was what the man of letters wanted, and Pierce humorously begs for a trial, undertaking to make it worth a patron s while. Nash s complaints of destitution in this tract are sometimes taken too literally ; it would seem that he had found a noble patron, and was living at his country seat in 1592, away from the plague in London, and writing his satirical masque Summer s Last Witt and Testament. In 1593 he tried his hand at a sermon, Christes Tears over Jerusalem, a really eloquent composition. In the preface to this, " not basely fear-blasted, or constraintively over ruled, but purely pacificatory," he holds out the hand of friendship to Gabriel Harvey, with whom he had begun a match in personal abuse, recorded in D Israeli s Quarrels of Authors. The overture was not accepted, and Nash resumed his "humorous objurgation" of the enemy. After Marlowe s death he put the unfinished tragedy of Dido in shape for the stage, but he had no portion of Marlowe s genius. In 1597 he was in trouble with the authorities for a play called the Isle of Dogs, which has not been preserved. The author retired to Yarmouth, and there wrote his last work Lenten Stuff (1599), nominally " in praise of a red herring," but really a description of Yarmouth which would now make the fortune of a special correspondent. NASHUA, a city of the United States, in Hillsborough county, New Hampshire, on hilly ground at the confluence of the Merrimac and the Nashua, 40 miles north-north-west of Boston by the Boston, Lowell, and Nashua Railroads. In 1803 the site was "a sandy plain covered with pine trees " ; but after the formation of the Nashua Manufactur ing Company in 1823 the village rapidly grew up, and by 1853 it was incorporated as a city. Its population increased from 10,543 in 1870 to 13,397 in 1880. The water-power of the Nashua river being rendered easily available by means of a canal 3 miles long and 8 feet deep, constructed in 1825-26, a great variety of industrial establishments are situated in the city. Besides the sheetings, shirtings, prints, and flannels manufactured by the original Nashua company and its younger rivals, iron goods, locks, edge tools, bedsteads, carpets, shuttles, bobbins, shoes, cards, glazed paper, are all produced on a large scale. NASHVILLE, a city of the United States, capital and largest city of Tennessee, and seat of justice of Davidson county, stands on the Cumberland River (spanned there by a suspension bridge and a truss railway bridge with a "draw" 200 feet long), 200 miles above its junction with the Ohio, in 36 10 N. lat. and 86 49 W. long. Occupy ing a site of considerable irregularity, and dominated by the hill (558 feet above the sea) on which the capitol is built, Nashville on the whole presents a picturesque and attractive appearance. The capitol is an imposing stone edifice, erected in 1845 at a cost of nearly $1,000,000, and surmounted by a central tower 206 feet in height. Other public buildings deserving mention are the court house (1857), the market-house and city-hall (1855), the State penitentiary (1830), the State blind asylum (1850), the four universities, and two large female seminaries. Nashville University, incorporated as Davidson College in 1785, as Cumberland College in 1806, and under its present name in 1825, now embraces three distinct schools, Montgomery Bell Academy, Nashville Medical College, one of the largest in the Southern States, and the Normal College, established and endowed by the trustees of the Peabody Fund. Vanderbilt University was founded in 1872 by six conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and in 1873 was named after Cornelius Vanderbilt of New York, who gave it $1,000,000. His son has given it about $250,000 additional. It has a fine group of buildings and 75 acres of land west of the city. In 1882 it had 51 instructors and 603 students. Fisk University, established in 1866 for the education of men of colour, and widely known through the Jubilee Singers, had 18 teachers and 424 students in 1882. The Tennessee Central (Methodist) College, likewise dating from 1866, is intended for coloured students, as is also the Roger Williams University (Baptist). The State library in the capitol had 27,000 volumes in 1882; and the Watkins