He wears a feather in his cap ‘as big as a flag in the fore-top’. His French doublet has been elaborately tailored, as if, ‘like a pig readie to be spitted … all [his] guts had been pluckt out’. His hose hangs down ‘like two scales filled with Holland cheeses’. At his side lies a rapier ‘like a round sticke fastned in the tacklings for skippers the better to climbe by’. On his back, a cloak of black cloth: like a ray, he tells us, or an elephant's ear, ‘that hangs on his’ – that is, on the elephant's – ‘shoulders like a countrie huswiues banskin, which shee fattens hir spindle on’. He wears no gloves, and his face displays the merest edging of a black moustache on the upper lip. Below that, ‘the like sable auglet of excrements in the first rising of the anckle of my chinne’. This, self-described, is Jack Wilton: page at the court of Henry VIII; servant of the Earl of Surrey; mercenary soldier; trickster; criminal; the narrator and the protagonist – one would not quite want to say the hero – of Thomas Nashe's prose fiction of 1594, The Unfortunate Traveller.

It is a passage that seems emblematic of the text it appears in. We are getting a description of Jack Wilton, but also perhaps a statement about ‘The Life of Iacke Wilton’, Nashe's subtitle; certainly a demonstration of his most characteristic technical device, which is vivid comparison.