Gabriel Harvey

Gabriel Harvey (c. 1552/3 – 1631) was an English writer. Harvey was a notable scholar, whose reputation suffered from his quarrel with Thomas Nashe. Henry Morley, writing in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), has argued that Harvey's Latin works demonstrate that he was distinguished by qualities very different from the pedantry and conceit usually associated with his name.

Gabriel Harvey was the eldest son of John Harvey (d.1593), a yeoman farmer and master ropemaker from Saffron Walden, Essex, and his wife, Alice (d.1613). He had two younger brothers, Richard and John (d. July 1592), and a sister, Mercy.

Harvey received his early education at the town's grammar school, and matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566. In 1570 he was elected fellow of Pembroke Hall. Here he formed a friendship with Edmund Spenser, who may have been his pupil.

Harvey wished to be "epitaphed as the Inventour of the English Hexameter," and was a prime mover in a literary clique known as the Areopagus which attempted to impose the Latin rules of quantity on English verse. In a letter to "M. Immerito" (Edmund Spenser) Harvey says that Edward Dyer and Philip Sidney were helping forward "our new famous enterprise for the exchanging of Barbarous and Balductum Rymes with Artificial Verses." The letter includes a tepid appreciation of Spenser's Faerie Queene which had been sent to him for his opinion, and he gives examples of English hexameters illustrative of the principles enunciated in the correspondence. The opening lines--"What might I call this Tree? A Laurell? O bonny Laurell Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto"—afford a fair sample of the success of Harvey's metrical experiments, which were an easy mark for the wit of Thomas Nashe. "He (Harvey) goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another," says Nashe in Strange Newes, and he mimics him in the mocking couplet:

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