"Reading the reviews on this page I can’t see much love for Nashe’s little essay. That is hardly surprising. Extracted from the context of his other works, and without historical introduction, it is a curious and unsatisfactory beast. And yet I love Nashe’s rambling, wordy, preposterous style, and this is one of my favourite of his works: it is like listening to the monologue of a half-drunk scholar, perhaps a minor character from a Shakespearean play, riffing endlessly on whatever comes to mind that is vaguely related to his topic.

Rereading the essay recently what struck me was the picture that it paints of what might be called the Elizabethan magical world-view � Nashe’s universe is densely populated with devils. They fill every corner of his Enlightenment consciousness. He writes:

“What do we talk of one devil? There is not a room in any man’s house but is pestered and close packed with a camp-royal of devils. Chrysostom saith the air and earth are three parts inhabited with spirits. Hereunto the philosopher alluded when he said nature made no voids in the whole universal, for no place (be it no bigger than a pock-hole in a man’s face) but is close thronged with them. Infinite millions of them will hang swarming about a worm-eaten nose…�

This startling vision of the demon-infested universe seems almost to prefigure germ theory � remarkable given that Nashe wrote at a time of plague�"