A gentleman, this counsellor continued, is known by his "Good entertainment of Ladies and gentlewomen. No salutation, without much respect and ceremony"--a reflection inspired no doubt by the memory of some snub received at Audley End. Health and the care of the body are of the utmost importance. "We scholars make an Ass of our body and wit". One must "leap out of bed lustily, every morning in ye whole year". One must be sparing in one's diet, and active, and take regular exercise, like brother H., "who never failed to breathe his hound once a day at least". There must be no "buzzing or musing". A learned man must also be a man of the world. Make it your "daily charge" "to exercise, to laugh; to proceed boldly". And if your tormentors brawl and rail and scoff and mock at you, the best answer is "a witty and pleasant Ironie". In any case, do not complain, "It is gross folly, and a vile Sign of a wayward and forward disposition, to be eftsoons complaining of this, or that, to small purpose". And if as time goes on without preferment, one cannot pay one's bills, one is thrust into prison, one has to bear the taunts and insults of landladies, still remember "Glad poverty is no poverty"; and if, as time passes and the struggle increases, it seems as if "Life is warfare", if sometimes the beaten man has to own, "But for hope ye Hart would brust", still his sage counsellor in the study will not let him throw up the sponge. "He beareth his misery best, that hideth it most" he told himself.

So runs the dialogue that we invent between the two Harveys--Harvey the active and Harvey the passive, Harvey the foolish and Harvey the wise. And it seems on the surface that the two halves, for all their counselling together, made but a sorry business of the whole. For the young man who had ridden off to Cambridge full of conceit and hope and good advice to his sister returned empty-handed to his native village in the end. He dwindled out his last long years in complete obscurity at Saffron Walden. He occupied himself superficially by practising his skill as a doctor among the poor of the neighbourhood. He lived in the utmost poverty off buttered roots and sheep's trotters. But even so he had his consolations, he cherished his dreams. As he pottered about his garden in the old black velvet suit, purloined, Nash says, from a saddle for which he had not paid, his thoughts were all of power and glory; of Stukeley and Drake; of "the winners of gold and the wearers of gold". Memories he had in abundance--"The remembrance of best things will soon pass out of memory; if it be not often renewed and revived", he wrote. But there was some eager stir in him, some lust for action and glory and life and adventure that forbade him to dwell in the past. "The present tense only to be regarded" is one of his notes. Nor did he drug himself with the dust of scholarship. Books he loved as a true reader loves them, not as trophies to be hung up for display, but as living beings that "must be meditated, practised and incorporated into my body and soul". A singularly humane view of learning survived in the breast of the old and disappointed scholar. "The only brave way to learn all things with no study and much pleasure", he remarked. Dreams of the winners of gold and the wearers of gold, dreams of action and power, fantastic though they were in an old beggar who could not pay his reckoning, who pressed simples and lived off buttered roots in a cottage, kept life in him when his flesh had withered and his skin was "riddled and crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment". He had his triumph in the end. He survived both his friends and his enemies--Spenser and Sidney, Nash and Perne.