Poets

Gabriel Harvey was an English writer. Harvey was a notable scholar, though his reputation suffered from his quarrel with Thomas Nashe. Henry Morley, writing in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), brought evidence from Harvey's Latin writings showing that he was distinguished by quite other qualities than the pedantry and conceit usually associated with his name.

Early life

The eldest son of a ropemaker from Saffron Walden, Essex, he matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566, and in 1570 was elected fellow of Pembroke Hall. Here he formed a lasting friendship with Edmund Spenser who may have been his pupil.

Promotion of hexameter verse

He wanted to be "epitaphed as the Inventour of the English Hexameter," and was the prime mover in the literary clique known as the Areopagus that wanted to impose the Latin rules of quantity on English verse. In a letter to M. Immerito (Edmund Spenser) he 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 document 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, ..