But Jack Wilton the "traveller" is a little more of a person than the pedagogic Euphues and the shadowy Philautus.

At any rate he has a very strong anticipation of Defoe, whose "Cavalier" was not improbably suggested by him.

But Nash has neither the patience of Defoe, nor that singular originality, which accompanies in the author of _Moll Flanders_ a certain inability to make the most of it.

_The Unfortunate Traveller_ is a sort of compilation or congeries of current _fabliaux, novelle_, and _facetiae_, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to give bait and attraction.

Sometimes it reminds one of a working up of the _Colloquies_ of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than _The Cloister and the Hearth_, with much less genius than Charles Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual novels behind him for nearly half the time.