teach me that my exercises were damnable, and that I should be wiped out of the book of life, if I did not speedily repent my looseness of life and reform my misdemeanours.

At this sermon the said learned man (who doubtless was the child of God) did beat down sin in such pithy and persuasive manner, that I began to call unto mind the danger of my soul, and the prejudice that at length would befall for those gross sins which with greediness I daily committed: in so much as sighing I said to myself, "Lord have mercy on me and send me grace to amend and become a new man!" But this good motion lasted not long in me; for no sooner had I met with my copesmates, but seeing me in such a solemn humour, they demanded the cause of my sadness: to whom, when I had discovered that I sorrowed for my wickedness of life, and that the preacher's words had taken a deep impression in my conscience, they fell upon me in jesting manner, calling me Puritan and Precisian, and wished I might have a pulpit, with other such scoffing terms, that by their foolish persuasion the good and wholesome lesson I had learned went quite out of my remembrance; so that I fell again with the dog to my old vomit, and put my wicked life in practice, and that so thoroughly as ever I did before.

Thus although God sent his Holy Spirit to call me, and though I heard him, yet I regarded it no longer than the present time, when suddenly forsaking it, I went forward obstinately in my vices. Nevertheless soon after I married a gentleman's daughter of good account, with whom I lived for a while; but forasmuch as she would persuade me from my wilful wickedness, after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage-money which I obtained by her.

Then I left her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire and I to London, where in short space I fell into favour with such as were of honourable and good calling. But here note that though I knew how to get a friend, yet I had not the gift or reason how to keep a friend, for he that was my dearest friend I would be so sure to behave myself toward him that he should ever after profess to be my utter enemy, or else vow never after to come into my company.

Thus my misdemeanours (too many to be recited) caused the most part of those so much to despise me that in the end I became friendless, except it were in a few alehouses, who commonly for my inordinate expenses would make much of me, until I were on the score, far more than ever I meant to pay by twenty nobles thick. After I had wholly betaken me to the penning of plays (which was my continual exercise) I was so far from calling upon God that I seldom thought on God, but took such delight

in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could think otherwise of me than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vain phantasies was my chiefest stay of living, and for these my vain discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continual companions, came still to my lodging, and there continue quaffing, carousing, and surfeiting with me all the day long.1

I see no reason whatever to question the authenticity of this autobiography, or-up to a certain point-the sincerity of the feelings which it professes. The only deduction to be made from it arises from the fact that to the day of his death the author was a professional rhetorician. He was master of a popular style, in which he found a source of profit. Lyly's most brilliant disciple, Greene was ready to avail himself of any subject which offered opportunities of treatment in the Euphuistic manner. When he began to write he naturally turned, like his master, to the theme of Love, and for several years poured forth a succession of amorous pamphlets and romances which were read with eagerness by all sorts and conditions of men, to whose barbarous taste the tricks of Euphuism seemed miracles of art. Thus between the years 1583 and 1589 we find him producing Mamillia, 1583; Mirror of Modesty, Morando, Card of Fancy, 1584; Planetomachia, 1585; Menaphon, Euphues, his Censure to Philautus, 1587; Tully's Love, 1589; to which may probably be added Alcida, Arbasto, and Penelope's Web. Among his patrons were all that section of the Court which, headed by the Earl of Oxford, cultivated the new dialect, including persons of such distinction as the Earls of Leicester, Arundel, Derby, and Essex; the Countesses of Derby, Cumberland, and Warwick; Lady Fitzwater, and Lady Mary Talbot.

It is always to be remembered, to Greene's credit, that, whatever were his private excesses, there is little or nothing of a corrupting tendency in his writings; his style, though soft and effeminate, is distinguished by

1 "The Repentance of Robert Greene," Dyce, Greene and Peele's Dramatic and Poetical Works, pp. 23-25.

fineness and delicacy of fancy, a quality which doubtless endeared him to female readers. After a time his vein was exhausted or his readers wearied of his sugary sweetness, and it then became necessary for him to find a new range of subjects. The readiest road to make money was to gratify the public curiosity by a recital of his own varied experience of the world; and accordingly, from 1590 till his death he continued to supply the booksellers with tracts or romances of a personal nature, such as Never too Late, A Groat's-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, or with pamphlets which, under the generic title of "Coney-catching," exposed the artifices of the different kinds of sharper in town. The Euphuistic style is as prominent in these as in Menaphon or the Censure to Philautus. Thus A Notable Discovery of Coosenage (1591) opens with the following address, “To the young Gentlemen, Merchants, Apprentices, Farmers, and plain Countrymen " :—

Diogenes, gentlemen, from a counterfeit coiner of money. became a current corrector of manners, as absolute in the one, as dissolute in the other; time refineth men's affects, and their humours grow different by the distinction of age. Poor Ovid, that amorously writ in his youth the art of love, complained in his exile amongst the Getes of his wanton follies. And Socrates' age was virtuous, though his youth was licentious. So, gentlemen, my younger years had uncertain thoughts, but now my ripe days call on to repentant deeds, and I sorrow as much to see others wilful, as I delighted once to be wanton.1

These are the postures of a rhetorician; and though we need not conclude that Greene was a hypocrite in his outcries about repentance, he knew that Repentance paid. He was, in fact, a poor creature, without the manliness of Gascoigne or the genius of Marlowe, a rake, who, so far from being able to act up to the standard of Italian virtù, which his companions admired, was reduced to making money out of exhibitions of the weakness of his own will. While he preached to his fellow playwrights and the public, he continued to live as before, and he died of the

1 Halliwell's Edition (1859), p. 3.

effects of a debauch on pickled herrings and Rhenish wine. His last illness was watched by the tender care of a poor woman, the wife of a shoemaker near Dowgate, with whom he lodged, and to whom he was largely in debt; and he was buried in the New Church near Bedlam on the 4th September 1592.

None of Greene's dramas was published before his death, and the learned editor of his works, Mr. Dyce, considers it impossible to say at how early a date they were produced upon the stage. While it is with hesitation that I express an opinion at variance with one proceeding from a source so accurate and acute, it seems to me that the evidence, external and internal, points clearly to the conclusion that all Greene's surviving plays were written after the production of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and as this fact, if established, is of vital importance both critically, as throwing light on the genius of Greene, and historically, as illustrating the progress of the drama, I proceed to lay my reasons before the reader.

Mr. Collier believes that Tamburlaine was the first play written in blank verse that was acted in a public theatre,1 He is probably right, for the author in his prologue shows that he is venturing on an innovation :— From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high astounding terms,

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.2

The effect of this play on the public taste was prodigious; and followed as it shortly was by Faustus, and afterwards by Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, it shook the position of Greene and his school, who had hitherto been the most popular purveyors for the stage. If we may trust the autobiographical novel, A Groat's-worth of Wit, Greene, after beginning his literary career as a writer of Euphuistic romance, had taken to play-writing as a means of supporting himself. This would have been about 1585,

1 History of English Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii. p. 112.
2 Marlowe's Works (Dyce), p. 5.

when he had taken his M.A. degree, and left Cambridge. He tells us in the tale referred to that he was turned to this course by a player who had made a name by acting in Delphrygus and King of the Fairies, names which seem to point to the fact that a species of drama, founded on classical fables, like Lyly's prose comedies, was then in vogue. Such a style would have been quite congenial with the facile bent of Greene's fancy, and it is not unreasonable to conjecture that he produced many plays on such subjects written in "jigging rhymes," like George Peele's Arraignment of Paris, and mixed perhaps with passages of prose of the kind found in his own later dramas, together with "such conceits as clownage keeps in pay." These lesser lights paled when Marlowe's genius in all its splendour rose suddenly above the horizon; the public began to express their discontent with the Euphuistic style; and Greene was forced to defend his practice. Like all monarchs in possession who feel their power to be on the decline, he affects disdain of the new comer, and says in his address to the reader prefixed to his Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588):

I keep my old course to potter up something in prose, using mine old poesy (posy) Omne tulit punctum, although lately two gentlemen poets made two madmen of Rome beat it out of their paper bucklers, and had it in derision that I could not make my verses jet (strut) upon the stage in tragical buskin, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun; but let me rather openly pocket up the ass at Diogenes' hand than wantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry, such mad and scoffing poets, that have prophetical spirits as bred of Merlin's race. If there be any in England that set the end of scholarism in English blank-verse, I think either it is the humour of a novice that tickles them with self-love, or too much frequenting the hothouse (to use the German proverb) hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits.

Here it is plain that the writer reprobates in the first place those Machiavellian principles on which, as I shall show, Marlowe founded his drama; and which Greene alludes to in his Repentance; and that in the second place