The author's striking Address to his brother poets, at the end of this tract, I reserve for a later part of the present essay. As the reader has now been made intimately acquainted with the Never too Late and the Groats-worth of Wit, he is left to set down as auto-biographical whatever portions of those pieces he may think proper. There is no doubt that Greene became the husband* of an amiable woman, whom, after she had borne him a child, he abandoned. His profligacy seems to have been the cause of their separation: but that they had once been strongly attached to each other is evident from the letter (hereafter to be given) which he wrote to her with his dying hand, wherein he affectingly conjures her to perform his last request "by the loue of our youth." It was, I apprehend, immediately after this rupture of his domestic ties that he repaired to the metropolis, determined to rely solely on the labours of his pen for the means of subsistence. From the following (somewhat confused) account of his career in The Repentance of Robert Greene, it would seem that, even before his unfortunate marriage, he was well known as a dramatist and a writer of "love-pamphlets" : "At my return into England [from travelling on the continent] I ruffeled out in my silks, in the habit of malcontent, and seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vocation cause mee to stay myselfe in : but after I had by degrees proceeded Maister of Arts, I left the vniuersitie and away to London; where (after I had continued some short time, and driuen my self out of credit with sundry of my frends) I became an author of playes, and a penner of love-pamphlets, so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie, that who for that trade growne so ordinary about London as Robin Greene? Yong yet in yeares, though olde in wickednes, I began to resolue that there was nothing bad that was profitable : wherevpon I grew so rooted in all mischiefe that I had as great a delight in wickednesse as sundrie hath in godlinesse, and as much felicitie I tooke in villainy as others had in honestie." Sig. C. "Yet, let me confesse a trueth, that euen once, and yet but once, I felt a feare and horrour in my conscience, and then the terrour of Gods iudgementes did manifestly teach me that my life was bad, that by sinne I deserued damnation, and that such was the greatnes of my sinne that I deserued no redemption. And this inward motion I receiued in Saint Andrews Church in the cittie of Norwich, at a lecture or sermon then preached by a godly learned man, "The following, from the peculiar wording of the registration, as well as from the correspondence of dates, reads like the entry of the marriage of the ill-governed Robert Greene at St. Bartholomew the Less: Greene, unto Elizabeth The xvjth day of Februarie, 1586, was maryed Wilde, otherwise Taylor." Collier's Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare,-Introd., p. xxi. + Wood's assertion that he used his pen for the support of his wife, I am unwillingly obliged to regard as one of worthy Anthony's mistakes: "Other trifles he hath extant, which he wrote to maintain his wife, and that high and loose course of living which poets generally follow."-Fasti Oxon. Part I. p. 246. ed. Bliss. whose doctrine and the maner of whose teaching I liked wonderfull well; yea, in my conscience, such was his singlenes of hart and zeale in his doctrine that hee might haue conuerted the worst* monster of the world. "Well, at that time, whosoeuer was worst, I knewe myselfe as bad as he; for being new-come from Italy (where I learned all the villainies vnder the heauens), I was drownd in pride, whoredome was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkennes was my onely delight. "At this sermon the terrour of Gods iudgementes did manifestly teach me that my exercises were damnable, and that I should bee wipte out of the booke of life, if I did not speedily repent my loosenes of life, and reforme my misdemeanors. "At this sermon the said learned man (who doubtles was the child of God) did beate downe sinne in such pithie and perswasiue manner, that I began to call vnto mind the daunger of my soule, and the preiudice that at length would befall mee for those grosse sinnes which with greedines I daily committed: in so much as sighing I said to myselfe, 'Lord haue mercie vpon mee, and send me grace to amend and become a new man!' But this good motion lasted not long in mee; for no sooner had I met with my copesmates, but seeing me in such a solemne humour, they demaunded the cause of my sadnes: to whom when I had discouered that I sorrowed for my wickednesse of life, and that the preachers wordes had taken a deepe impression in my conscience, they fell vpon me in ieasting manner, calling me Puritane and Presizian, and wished I might haue a pulpit, with such other scoffing tearmes, that by their foolish perswasion the good and wholesome lesson I had learned went quite out of my remembrance; so that I fel againe with the dog to my olde vomit, and put my wicked life in practise, and that so throughly as euer I did before. "Thus although God sent his holy spirit to call mee, and though I heard him, yet I regarded it no longer than the present time, when sodainly forsaking it, I went forward obstinately in my misse.+ Neuerthelesse, soone after I married a gentleman's daughter of good account, with whom I liued for a while but forasmuch as she would perswade me from my wilfull wickednes, after I had a child by her, I cast her off, hauing spent vp the marriage-money which I obtained by her. "Then left I her at six or seuen, who went into Lincolneshire, and I to London; where in short space I fell into favor with such as were of honorable and good calling. But heere note, that though I knew how to get a friend, yet I had not the gift or reason how to keepe a friend; for hee that was my dearest friend, I would bee sure so to behaue my selfe towards him, that he shoulde euer after professe to bee my vtter enemie, or else vowe neuer after to come in my company. "Thus my misdemeanors (too many to be recited) caused the most part of those so much to despise me that in the end I became friendles, except it were in a fewe worst] Old ed. "most." misse] i. e. amiss,—sin. alehouses, who commonly for my inordinate expences would make much of me, vntil I were on the score, far more than euer I meant to pay by twenty nobles thick. After I had wholy betaken me to the penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise), I was so far from calling vpon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise of mee than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of loue and vaine fantasies was my chiefest stay of lining; and for those my vaine discourses I was beloued of the more vainer sort of people, who beeing my continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long."-Sig. C 2. Greene chiefly claims our notice as a poet; for though his prose-writings greatly exceed in number his poetical works, yet the former are almost all interspersed with verses, and are composed in that ornamental and figurative style which is akin to poetry. The date of the earliest of his publications yet discovered is 1583.* At that time the most distinguished poets alive in England were these. Thomas Churchyard; an indefatigable manufacturer of coarse-spun rhyme, who had been plying his trade for many years, and who continued to ply it for many more. Barnaby Googe; whose Zodiake of Life (a translation from Palingenius) was greatly admired. Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst; whose Gorboduc (composed in conjunction with Thomas Norton) is the earliest specimen in our language of a regular tragedy, and whose very picturesque "Induction" in the Mirror for Magistrates still shines with a lustre that throws the rest of that bulky chronicle into the shade. Arthur Golding; who rendered Ovid's Metamorphoses into spirited and flowing lines. Nicholas Breton; who persevered in employing his fertile pen till a late period in the succeeding reign; a man of no ordinary genius, writing in his more inspired moments with tenderness The First part of Mamillia: see List of Greene's prose-works at the end of this memoir. "The earliest edition of it [The First Part of Mamillia] bears date in 1583; and by some verses signed G. B., in praise of the author and his booke,' which are prefixed, it is clear that it was written, if not published, before Greene left college; 'Greene is the plant, Mamillia is the flowre, Cambridge the plat where plant and flower growes.' My friend, the Rev. A. Dyce, in his beautiful edition of Greene's Works, in two vols. 8vo., also gives the date of 1583 to the publication of the first part of Greene's Mamillia. See vol. I. cviii. The second part of Mamillia was undoubtedly first printed in 1593; and I apprehend that there may be a mistake of a figure on the title of the first part. Greene would hardly write the second part of the same story nearly ten years after the appearance of the first part." Collier's Hist. of Engl. Dram. Poet., iii. 148, note. Assuredly there is no "mistake" on the title-page of the First Part of Mamillia: the typography and spelling of that tract evince it to be of as early a date as 1583. Assuredly, too, the Second Part of Mamillia was written while Greene was resident at Cambridge (the Dedication being dated "From my Studie in Clare hall"), though it was not printed till 1593, when the author was in his grave: and we may conclude that it was one of those "many papers" which, as Chettle tells us (see before, p. 2, note), Greene left "in sundry booksellers' hands." and delicacy. George Whetstone; whose Promos and Cassandra having afforded hints to Shakespeare for Measure for Measure, will prevent his name from being forgotten by posterity. Edmund Spenser; celebrated only as the author of The Shepherds Calendar. Sir Philip Sidney; whose songs and sonnets were then undoubtedly familiar to his countrymen, though they were not committed to the press till after an heroic death had set the seal upon his glory. Sir Edward Dyer; * of whose productions none have descended to our times that seem to justify the contemporary applause which he received. John Lyly; who in all probability was then well-known as a dramatist, though his dramas appear to have been intended only for court-shows or private exhibitions, and though none of them were printed before 1584; and who in 1579 had put forth his far-famed Euphues, which gave a tone to the prose-works of Greene. Thomas Watson; who had published a collection of elaborate and scholar-like sonnets, entitled Exаroμяabia, or The Passionate Centurie of Love, and who wrote Latin verses with considerable skill and elegance : and Richard Stanyhurst; who went mad in English hexameters, seriously intending his monstrous absurdities for a translation of the first four books of The Eneid. *To modern readers Dyer was known as a poet only by some short and scattered pieces till the discovery, about twenty years ago, of a copy of his Sixe Idillia, translated from Theocritus, printed at Oxford in 1588. "Tell me, in good sooth, doth it not too euidently appeare, that this English poet wanted but a good patterne before his eyes, as it might be some delicate and choyce elegant poesie of good M. Sidneys or M. Dyers (ouer very Castor and Pollux for such and many greater matters), when this trimme geere was in hatching?" G. Harvey's Three proper and wittie familiar Letters, &c. 1580, p. 36. "Hic quoque seu subeas Sydnæi, siue Dyeri Scrinia, qua Musis area bina patet," &c. Authoris ad libellum suum Protrepticon. Watson's Passionate Centurie of Love, n. d. [1581, or 2.] "Come, diuine poets, and sweet oratours, the siluer streaming fountaines of flowingest witt and shiningest art; come Chawcer and Spencer, More and Cheeke, Ascham and Astely, Sidney and Dier.”— G. Harvey's Pierces Supererogation, &c., 1593, p. 173. 66 Spencer and Shakespeare did in art excell, Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel," &c. Praise of Hempseed,-Taylor's Works, p. 72, ed. 1630. As Stanyhurst's strange volume is now lying before me, and as very few of my readers can ever have seen it, I subjoin a short specimen of its style from the Second Book of The Eneid-("Primus ibi ante omnes magna comitante caterva," &c. v. 40)—; "First then among oothers, with no smal coompanie garded, ر The following writers, some of whom started about the same time with him on the race for fame, were added to the catalogue of English poets during Greene's years of authorship. Christopher Marlowe; whose dramas in delineation of character and bursts of passion were immeasurably superior to any that had been before presented on our stage, and whose fine ear enabled him to give his fervid lines a modulation unknown to earlier writers. George Peele ;* who may be regarded as the next most distinguished play-wright of his day, and who attempted various sorts of poetry with success. William Warner; the tediousness of whose long and homely Albion's England is relieved by passages of sweet simplicity. Abraham Fraunce; † who cultivated the unmanageable English hexameter. Thomas Nash; ‡ more noted And for a ful reckning, I like not barrel or herring; Thee Greeks bestowing their presents Greekish I feare mee.' The First Fovre Bookes of Virgils Eneis, &c. 1583, p. 22. [Since this memoir first appeared, Stanyhurst's Virgil has been reprinted.] Justly did Nash characterize the English hexameter as "that drunken staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horse plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust vp to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes."-Haue with you to Saffron- Walden, &c., 1596. Sig. A 3. * There are eleven lines of blank-verse by Peele, prefixed to Watson's Eкатоμжаbia, &c., n. d., which was published in 1581 or early in 1582; but we must not on account of so trifling an effusion set him down as a writer anterior to Greene. + Fraunce is sometimes ridiculous enough. Appended to the Second Part of his Countesse of Pembrokes Iuychurch, 1591, is a translation into English hexameters of part of the First Book of the Ethiopica of Heliodorus; and the words "Hon dè Яλɩov πρòs dvσμàs tovтos (Cap. vii.) he chooses to render thus ; "Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended, And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to beewashed." Sig. M 3. "Du penible Phlegon la narine ronflante Souffloit sur les Indois la clarté rougissante Qui reconduit le jour," &c., a passage which is translated as follows (see England's Parnassus, 1600, p. 330, and Sylvester's Du Bartas, p. 364, ed. 1641) by Thomas Hudson; "The snoring snout of restlesse Phlegon blew Hot on the Indes, which did the day renew (Perhaps I need hardly add that Du Bartas recollected Virgil, En. xii. 114; "" cum primum alto se gurgite tollunt Solis equi, lucemque elatis naribus efflant.") I have not hesitated to include Nash in this list, believing that, as his livelihood depended on his pen, he must have produced about this time several plays which have not come down to us, and which, perhaps, were never given to the press (his satirical play called The Isle of Dogs, which he produced in 1597, was certainly never printed). In 1587 he wrote the address "To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities," prefixed to our author's Menaphon; and it is extremely unlikely that he should not have tried his powers as a dramatist till after Greene's death in 1592. (We now know that |