[70] The "Libro aureo" appeared in 1529; it was translated into French in 1531, and went through a great many editions, entitled sometimes "Le Livre dore de Marc-Aurele"; sometimes "L'Horloge des princes." North's translation, which followed the French editions, is entitled, "The Diall of Princes, by Guevara, englyshed out of the Frenche," London, 1557, fol.; it had several editions. It is to the Marcus Aurelius of Guevara that La Fontaine alludes in his "Paysan du Danube"; the story of the peasant was one of the most popular of the "Golden Boke." Guevara's style, with all the supplementary embellishments that Lyly has added, was already to be seen in the collection of short stories by Pettie, 1576 (supra, p. 81) of which one of the early editions begins like "Euphues," with an epistle to the "gentlewomen readers."

[71] "Le Bestiaire d'Amour," ed. Hippeau, Paris, 1840, 8vo. Richard de Fournival died about 1260. The MS. followed in this edition is dated 1285.

[72] "Sa nature si est que quand il trouve un homme, si le devore, et quand il l'a devore, si le pleure tous les jours de sa vie."

[73] Fragments of which remain in the "Codex Exoniensis," ed. Thorpe, London, 1842, 8vo. The Panther, p. 355; the Whale, p. 360, &c.

[74] "An old English Miscellany, containing a bestiary," ed. R. Morris, London, Early English Text Society, 1872.

[75] Recently published by Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith and M. Paul Meyer, Paris, Societe des anciens textes Francais, 1889, 8vo.

[76] "The historie of Foure-footed beastes, describing the true and lively figure of every beast," London, 1607, fol. "The historie of Serpents or the second book of living creatures," London, 1608, fol.

[77] "Alcida. Greenes metamorphosis," licensed 1588; earliest known edition, 1617.

[78] "Foure-footed beastes," ut supra, pp. 1, 199, 328, 453.

[79] "Historie of serpents," ut supra, pp. 111, 140, 236, &c.

[80] It should not, however, be thence concluded that Lyly is original in all his moral dissertations; as Dr. Landmann has pointed out (see supra, p. 106) he often borrows large passages from Plutarch and Guevara; but what is remarkable is the intense and persistent conviction, and also the success, at least success in so far that it was read, with which this young man of twenty-five, who was of the world and not of the church, preaches good morals to all classes of society.

[81] Preface to Part II.

[82] "Correspondence of Samuel Richardson," ed. Barbauld, London, 1804, 6 vols. 12mo.

[83] The meaning of his name is thus given by Ascham in his "Scholemaster" (1570): "[Greek: Euphues] is he that is apte by goodnes of witte and appliable by readines of will, to learning, having all other qualities of the minde and partes of the bodie that must an other day serve learning, not troubled, mangled or halfed, but sounde, whole, full, and hable to do their office." So was Grandison.

[84] Arber's reprint, pp. 106 et seq.

[85] "Pantagruel," bk. iii. ch. xxxi.

[86] Compare the meditations of the same sort of the Pedant in the "Pedant joue," of Cyrano de Bergerac.

[87] For instance, the letter on the nursing of children by their mothers (vol. iii. of the original edition, letter 56), and the long letter where Pamela takes to pieces Locke's "Treatise on Education," and remodels it according to her own ideas (vol. iv. letters 48 et seq.).

[88] Arber's reprint, ut supra, "Euphues and his Ephoebus," pp. 123 et seq.

[89] "Euphues and Atheos," Arber's reprint, ut supra, pp. 160, et seq.

[90] "Certeine Letters writ by Euphues to his friends," ibid., pp. 178 et seq.

[91] "Euphues and his England. Containing his voyage and adventures, myxed with sundry pretie discourses of honest love, the description of the countrey, the court and the manner of that Isle.... by John Lyly, Maister of Arte, London 1580," reprinted by Arber, ut supra.

[92] "Euphues and his England," ut supra, p. 442.

[93] Preface to the "Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophres," 1477.

[94] Antwerp, Nov. 14, 1579, "Correspondence of Sir Ph. Sidney and Hubert Languet," ed. Pears, London, 1845, 8vo, p. 167.

[95] Preface "to the Reader" in "Six Court Comedies ... by the onely rare poet of that time, the wittie, comicall, facetiously-quicke and unparalelld John Lilly," London, 1632, 12mo.

[96] "Dramatic Works," ed. Fairholt, London, 1858, two vols. 8vo.

[97] Watson was then about twenty-five years old. "Poems," reprinted by Arber, London, 1870, 4to.

[98] "'Euphues' I read when I was a little ape in Cambridge, and I then thought it was ipse ille; it may be excellent still for ought I know, but I lookt not on it this ten yeare" ("Strange Newes," 1592).

[99] "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus," ed. Macray, Oxford, 1886, 8vo. "The Returne," part i. act v. sc. 2. This part was performed in 1600.

[100] "1 Henry IV.," act ii. sc. 4 (A.D. 1597-8, Furnivall).

[101] "De vermakelijke historie Zee-een Landreize van Euphues," Rotterdam, 1671, 12mo. Another edition of the same, 1682.

[102] London, 1718, 16mo. "Price 2s." (on title-page). Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" appeared the next year; Richardson's "Pamela" was published in 1740.



CHAPTER IV.

LYLY'S LEGATEES.

I.

All Lyly's imitators, Greene, Lodge, Melbancke, Riche, Munday, Warner, Dickenson, and others, did not faithfully copy his style in all its peculiarities, at any rate in all their works; some of them borrowed only his ideas, others his plot; others his similes; most of them, however, when they first began to write, went the fullest length in imitation, and tricked themselves out in euphuistic tinsel. They were careful by choosing appropriate titles for their novels to publicly connect themselves with the euphuistic cycle. "Euphues" was a magic pass-word, and they well knew that the name once pronounced, the doors of the "boudoirs," or closets as they were then called, and the hands of the fair ladies, were sure to open; the book was certain to be welcome.

Hence the number of writers who declared themselves Euphues' legatees and executors. Year after year, for a while, readers saw issuing from the press such books as "Zelauto, the fountaine of Fame ... containing a delicate disputation ... given for a friendly entertainment to Euphues at his late arrival into England," by Munday, 1580; or as "Euphues his censure to Philautus, wherein is presented a philosophicall combat betweene Hector and Achylles," by Robert Greene, 1587: "Gentlemen," says the author to the readers, "by chance, some of Euphues loose papers came to my hand, wherein hee writ to his friend Philautus from Silexedra, certaine principles necessary to bee observed by every souldier." Or there was "Menaphon, Camillas alarum to slumbering Euphues," by the same, 1589; "Rosalynde, Euphues golden legacie, found after his death in his cell at Silexedra," by Thomas Lodge, 1590; "Arisbas, Euphues amidst his slumbers," by John Dickenson, 1594, &c.[103] All these authors continued their model's work in contributing to the development of literature written chiefly for ladies; in that way especially was Lyly's initiative fruitful.

Barnabe Riche, for example, publishes "Don Simonides,"[104] a story of a foreigner who travels in Italy and then comes to London, like Euphues, mixes in good society, and makes the acquaintance of Philautus; he writes this romance "for the amusement of our noble gentilmen as well as of our honourable ladies." He wrote also a series of short stories,[105] this time "for the onely delight of the courteous gentlewoemen bothe of England and Irelande;" and, for fear they should forget his design of solely pleasing them, he addresses them directly in the course of his narrative: "Now, gentilwomen, doe you thinke there could have been a greater torment devised, wherewith to afflicte the harte of Silla?" Shakespeare, an assiduous reader of collections of this kind, and who, unfortunately for their authors, has not transmitted his taste to posterity, was acquainted with Riche's tales, and drew from this same story of Silla the principal incidents of his "Twelfth Night." Riche himself had taken it from the "Histoires tragiques" of Belleforest, and Belleforest had translated it from Bandello.

Munday's Zelauto[106] is also a traveller. A son of the Duke of Venice, he goes on his travels, after the example of Euphues, visiting Naples and Spain, where he falls "in the company of certain English merchants," very learned merchants, "who, in the Latin tongue, told him the happy estate of England and how a worthy princes governed their common wealth." He comes accordingly to this country, for which he feels an admiration equal to Euphues' own. From thence he "takes shipping into Persia," and visits Turkey, prepared upon any emergency to fight valiantly or to speak eloquently, his hand and tongue being equally ready with thrusts and parries, or comparisons and similes.

Again we find Lyly's manner in Melbancke's "Philotimus,"[107] 1583, a book full, as "Euphues," of letters, dialogues, and philosophical discussions, and in Warner's "Pan his Syrinx," 1584. Warner, whose fame mainly rests on his long poem, "Albion's England," published in 1586, began his literary career as a novelist of the euphuistic school. In common with many youths of all times, of whom Lyly was one, he was scarcely out of "non-age," to use his own word, than he wanted to impart to his fellow-men his experience of a life, for him just begun, and to teach them how to behave in a world of which he knew only the outside. He lands his hero, Sorares, "in a sterile and harborlesse island," not a rare occurrence even in novels anterior to Defoe; Sorares' sons start to find him. Both they and their father meet with sundry adventures, in the course of which they tell or hear stories and take part in various "controversies and complayntes." Many topics are philosophically discussed; the chief being, as in Lyly, woman. One of the speakers puts forward the assertion that there may be, after all, some good in women; but another demonstrates that there is none at all; and that their name of "wo-man" contains their truest definition. Whereupon, we are treated once more to a description of dresses and fashions: "Her face painted, her beautie borrowed, her haire an others, and that frisled, her gestures enforced, her lookes premeditated, her backe bolstred, her breast bumbasted, her shoulders bared and her middle straite laced, and then is she in fashion!" Of course this does not apply to English, but to Scythian and Assyrian ladies. This description is followed, as in Lyly, by a proper antidote, and with a number of rules to be observed by all the honest people who desire to escape the wiles of the feminine sex.

Warner's book had some success; it reached a second edition in 1597,[108] in which the author states that two writers, at least, copied him, sometimes "verbatim" without any acknowledgment; one of them seems to have been no less a person than Robert Greene, "a scholler," says Warner, "better than my selfe on whose grave the grasse now groweth green, whom otherwise, though otherwise to me guiltie, I name not." Several incidents in Greene's works resemble Warner's stories, especially the one called "Opheltes," the plot of which forcibly reminds us of "Francesco's Fortunes," and at the same time of a different work of greater fame, the "Two Gentlemen of Verona."[109]

When Warner spoke, apparently, of Greene as a "scholler" better than himself he was quite right, and as a matter of fact, Lyly's two most famous disciples were Thomas Lodge, a friend of Riche, who helped him to revise his works and corrected his faulty verses, and Robert Greene, a novelist and dramatist like Lodge and Lyly, and a friend of the former. Endowed with a less calm and sociable temperament than their model, Greene and Lodge led a chequered existence very characteristic of their epoch.

II.

With Robert Greene we are in the midst of Bohemia, not exactly the Bohemia which Muerger described and which dies in the hospital: the hospital corresponds in some manner to ideas of order and rule; under Elizabeth men remained irregular to the end; literary men who were not physicians like Lodge, or shareholders in a theatre like Shakespeare, or subsidized by the Court like Ben Jonson, died of hunger in the gutter, or of indigestion at a neighbour's house, or of a sword-thrust in the tavern. Therein is one of the peculiarities of the period. It distinguishes the Bohemia of Elizabeth from other famous Bohemias, that of Grub Street, known to Dr. Johnson, and that of the quartier latin described by Muerger.

Greene was one of the most original specimens of the unfortunate men who in the time of Elizabeth attempted to live by their pen. He was as remarkable for his extravagances of conduct as for his talents, sometimes gaining money and fame by the success of his writings, sometimes sinking into abject poverty and consorting with the outcasts of society. Of all the writers of the Elizabethan period he is perhaps the one whose life and character we can best picture to ourselves; for in his last years, repentant and sorrow-stricken, he wrote with the utmost sincerity autobiographical tales and pamphlets, which are invaluable as a picture of the times; they are, in fact, nothing else than the "Scenes de la vie de Boheme" of Elizabethan England.

In these books Greene gives us the key to his own character, to his many adventures, and to his miserable end. There were two separate selves in him, and they proved incompatible. One was full of reasonable, sensible, and somewhat bourgeois tendencies, highly appreciating honour respectability, decorum, civic and patriotic virtues; of women liking only those that were pure, of men those that were honest, religious and good citizens. Greene's other self was not, properly speaking, the counterpart of the first, and had no taste for vices as vices, nor for disorder as disorder, but was wholly and solely bent upon enjoyment, immediate enjoyment whatever be the sort, the cost, or the consequence. Hence the glaring discrepancies in Greene's life, his faults, not to say his crimes, his sudden short-lived repentances, his supplications to his friends not to imitate his example, his incapacity to follow steadily one course or the other. His better self kept his writings free from vice, but was powerless to control his conduct. This struggle between the forces of good and evil is exceedingly well depicted in Greene's Repentances, under his own or fictitious names; of all the heroes of his tales he is himself the most interesting and the most deeply studied. As a novel writer and an observer of human nature, his own portrait is perhaps his masterpiece.

Greene was born at Norwich about 1560, and belonged to a family in easy circumstances. He was sent to Cambridge, where he was admitted to St. John's College on November, 1575. There, according to a propensity that was inborn, he at once associated with noisy, unprincipled young fellows. This propensity accompanied him through life, and led him to constantly surround himself with a rabble of merry companions, to be greatly liked by them, but to make few sincere friends, and to quarrel with these very often, to drop their acquaintance, to befriend them again, and so on to the last.

The universities at that time were not places of edification; and Lyly, who during the same period had a personal experience of them, was careful when, shortly afterwards, he wrote his advice for the education of "Ephoebus" to warn fathers of the dangers of university life: "To speak plainly of the disorder of Athens [that is, Oxford] who does not se it and sorrow at it? Such playing at dice, such quaffing of drink, such daliaunce with women, such dauncing, that in my opinion there is no quaffer in Flaunders so given to tipplyng, no courtier in Italy so given to ryot, no creature in the world so misled as a student in Athens." Many return from the universities "little better learned, but a great deal worse lived, then when they went, and not only unthrifts of their money, but also banckerouts of good manners."[110]

Greene did not fail to choose his associates among people of this sort, and with some of them he crossed over to the continent in his turn to visit "Circe." "Being at the University of Cambridge, I light amongst wags as lewd as my selfe, with whome I consumed the flower of my youth, who drew me to travell into Italy and Spaine, in which places I saw and practizde such villainie as is abhominable to declare...." He comes back, and after the pleasures and excitement of travel, ordinary every-day life seems to him tasteless; the mere idea of a regular career of any sort is abhorrent to him. "At my return into England, 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."[111]

In this uncertainty, and with his head full of Italian remembrances and romantic adventures, he thought, being not yet twenty, to try his hand at writing. His first attempt was a novel, a love story in the Italian fashion, in which very much loving was to do for very little probability and less observation of character and nature. It was called "Mamillia"; it was finished in 1580, and published three years later.

Greene at that time was again in Cambridge, and strange to say, among the many whims that crossed his mind, a fancy took him to apply himself to study. Gifted as he was, this caused him no trouble; he acquired much varied knowledge, of which his writings show sufficient proof, and was received M.A. in 1583.[112] He then left the university and went to London, where the most curious part of his life, that was to last only nine years longer, began.

The reception awarded to "Mamillia" seems to have encouraged him to continue writing. It had, in fact, crude as it seems to us now, many qualities that would ensure it a welcome: its style was euphuistic; its tone was Italian; its plot was intricate, and, lastly, there was very much love in it. He continued therefore in this vein, writing with extreme facility and rapidity improbable love stories, with wars, kings, and princesses, with euphuism and mythology, with Danish, Greek, Egyptian and Bohemian adventures. There was a "Myrrour of Modesty" which has for its heroine the chaste Susannah, a "Gwydonius, the card of fancie," again a tale in the Italian style, an "Arbasto" which tells of the wars and loves of a Danish king, a "Morando," containing a series of discussions and speeches on love, all of them entered or published in 1584-6. Then came his "Planetomachia," 1585, where the several planets describe and exemplify their influence on human fate; "Penelopes web," 1587, containing a succession of short stories; "Perimedes," 1588, imitated from Boccaccio; "Pandosto," a tale of Bohemian and Sicilian kings and shepherds, which had an immense success, much greater according to appearances than the exquisite drama of a "Winter's Tale," that Shakespeare drew from it. "Alcida," a story of the metamorphosis of three young love-stricken princesses of an island "under the pole antartike," was apparently published in the same year; "Menaphon," a charming pastoral tale, appeared in 1589, and several others followed. His popularity was soon considerable; his books were in all the shops; several went through an extraordinary number of editions; his name was better known than any: "I became," says he, "an author of playes, and a penner of love pamphlets, so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie," and who then "for that trade" was there "so ordinarie about London as Robin Greene?"[113]

As for his beginning to write plays, he has left a lively account of the casual meeting which led to his becoming attached to a company of players and to be for a time their playwright in ordinary. It was at a moment when his purse was empty; for as he quaintly puts it in one of his stories: "so long went the pot to the water, that at last it came broken home; and so long put he his hand into his purse that at last the emptie bottome returned him a writt of non est inventus; for well might the divell dance there for ever a crosse to keepe him backe."[114] In this difficulty he met by chance a brilliantly dressed fellow who seemed to be a cavalier, and happened to be a player. It is a well-known fact that if scenery was scanty in Elizabethan play-houses, the players' dresses were very costly, and if need there was, this would be an additional proof that no monetary consideration would have induced the young man who played, for example, the part of Shakespeare's Cleopatra, to appear in less than queenly ruffs and farthingales, such as Rogers has represented in his portrait of Elizabeth.

"What is your profession? said Roberto [that is, Robert Greene].[115]

"Truely, sir, said he, I am a player.

"A player, quoth Roberto; I tooke you rather for a gentleman of great living, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you woud be taken for a substantiall man.

"So am I, where I dwell, quoth the player, reputed able at my proper cost, to build a windmill. What, though the worlde once went hard with me, when I was faine to carrie my playing fardle a footebacke; tempora mutantur ... it is otherwise now; for my share in playing apparell will not be solde for two hundred pounds."

The player goes on relating his own successes, the parts he performs, and how he had been himself for a while the playwright of his troop, but that had been some time ago; tastes are changing and his wit is now out of fashion: "Nay, more, I can serve to make a prettie speech, for I was a countrie author, passing at a morall, for it was I that pende the moral of mans wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seaven yeeres space was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my Almanacke is out of date:

The people make no estimation Of morals teaching education.

"Was not this prettie for a plaine rime extempore? If ye will, ye shall have more.

"Nay, it is enough, said Roberto, but how meane you to use mee?

"Why, sir, in making playes, said the other, for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the paines."

Greene did so, and with no mean success. He grew more and more famous, and, without becoming more wealthy, had the pleasure of being able to squander at one time much larger sums of money than before: "Roberto was now famozed for an arch-playmaking-poet; his purse, like the sea, somtime sweld, anon like the same sea fell to a low ebb; yet seldom he wanted, his labors were so well esteemed."

He had not yet broken all connection with his birth-place and his family, and some of his visits were for him memorable ones. During one of them he was seized with a sudden fit of repentance for the loose life he had been leading in London; the better man in him made himself heard, and he fell into such an abyss of misery and despair as to remind us of the great conversions of the Puritan epoch. In fact, his companions, when he again saw them, wondering at his altered countenance, called him a Puritan. "Once I felt a feare and horrour in my conscience, and then the terrour of Gods judgementes did manifestly teach me that my life was bad, that by sinne I deserved damnation, and that such was the greatnes of my sinne that I deserved no redemption. And this inward motion I received in St. Andrews church in the cittie of Norwich, at a lecture or sermon then preached by a godly learned man.... At this sermon the terrour of Gods judgementes 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."

In the same way, in the next century, George Fox the Quaker, John Bunyan, and many others, were to find themselves awe-stricken at the thought of God's judgment; in the same way also, and in almost the same words, the hero of a novel that was to be world-famous in the following age was to express the sudden horror he felt when remorse began to prey upon him. "No one," wrote Robinson Crusoe, in his journal, "that shall ever read this account will expect that I shall be able to describe the horrors of my soul at this terrible vision." But Greene differed from them all by the short duration of his anxieties: "This good notion lasted not long in mee, for no sooner had I met with my copesmates, but seeing me in such a solemn humour, they demaunded the cause of my sadnes ... they fell upon me in a jeasting manner, calling me Puritane and Presizian, and wished I might have a pulpit." And soon the good effect of the godly vision in St. Andrew's church wore away.

He allowed another chance of escaping his final doom to pass in the same manner. Famous as he was all over the country, witty and brilliant, with such patrons as Leicester, Essex and Arundel, to whom several of his works are dedicated, he became acquainted with "a gentlemans daughter of good account." He loved her; his suit was favoured, and he married her, about 1586. He lived with her for a year and they had a boy; but she objected to his disorderly ways of life, and he, unable to alter them, "cast her off, having spent the marriage money." She returned to Lincolnshire, he to London, and they never met again. That Greene, however, had felt within himself what it is to be a father is shown by the exquisite "lullaby" he composed shortly after for Sephestia in his "Menaphon." It is the well-known song:

"Weepe not my wanton! smile upon my knee! When thou art olde, ther's griefe inough for thee! Mothers wagge, pretie boy, Fathers sorrow, fathers joy. When thy father first did see Such a boy by him and mee, He was glad, I was woe. Fortune changde made him so, When he left his pretie boy, Last his sorowe, first his joy.

* * * * *

Weepe not my wanton! smile upon my knee! When thou art olde, ther's griefe inough for thee! The wanton smilde, father wept; Mother cride, babie lept: More he crowde, more we cride; Nature could not sorowe hide. He must goe, he must kisse Childe and mother, babie blisse: For he left his pretie boy, Fathers sorowe, fathers joy."



In London he continued a favourite: "For these my vaine discourses [that is, his love novels] I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continuall companions came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, corowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long." One of his best friends has corroborated his statement, giving at the same time a graphic description of his physical appearance: "Hee inherited more vertues than vices," wrote Nash, "a jolly long red peake [beard] like the spire of a steeple he cherisht continually, without cutting, whereat a man might hang a jewell, it was so sharp and pendant ... He had his faultes ... Debt and deadly sinne, who is not subject to?... A good fellow he was ... In a night and a day would he have yarkt up a pamphlet as well as in seaven yeare, and glad was that printer that might bee so blest to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit. He made no account of winning credite by his workes ... His only care was to have a spel in his purse to conjure up a good cuppe of wine with at all times."[116]

The few samples that have come to us of the talk in these meetings of Elizabethan literary men show, as might well have been supposed, that it was not lacking in freedom. Greene himself has left an account of one of these conversations, when he expressed, Bohemia-wise, his opinions of a future life and, without Aucassin's extenuating plea that he was love-mad, he exclaimed: "Hell, quoth I, what talke you of hell to me? I know if I once come there, I shall have the company of better men than my selfe; I shall also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse. But you are mad folks, quoth I, for if I feared the judges of the Bench no more than I dread the judgments of God, I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, make merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they would last."[117]

His associations at that time were getting lower and lower. He was leaving Bohemia for the mysterious haunts of robbers, sharpers, loose women, and "conny-catchers." He had once for a mistress the sister of a famous thief nicknamed Cutting Ball that ended his days on the gallows, and he had a child by her, called Fortunatus, who died in 1593. He thought it a sort of atonement to communicate to the public the experience he derived from his life among these people, and accordingly printed a series of books on "conny-catching," in which he unveiled all their tricks and malpractices. The main result was that they wanted to kill him.[118]

It was, in fact, too late to reform; all that was left for him was to repent, an empty repentance that no deed could follow. Though scarcely thirty his constitution was worn out. The alternations of excessive cheer and of scanty food had ruined his health; it was soon obvious that he could not live much longer. One day a "surfet which hee had taken with drinking"[119] brought him home to his room, in a poor shoemaker's house, who allowed him to stay there by charity on credit. He was not to come out alive. His illness lasted some weeks, and as his brain power was unimpaired he employed his time in writing the last of his autobiographical pamphlets. Considering the extravagance of his life, in which he had known so many successes, and the sorrows of his protracted illness, they read very tragically indeed. He addressed himself to the public at large, to his more intimate friends, to his wife confessing his wrongs towards her, and asking pardon. Yet to the last, broken as he was in body, he remained a literary man, and while confessing all round and pardoning every one, he could not drop his literary animosities nor forget his life-long complaint against plagiarists.

His complaint was one of which the world of letters was to hear much more in after time, and which in fact is constantly renewed in our own day; it is the complaint of the novelist against the dramatist, claiming as his own incidents transferred by the playwright from readers to spectators. As novels proper were just beginning then in England, and as drama was also beginning to spread, Greene's protest is one of the first on record, and thousands were to follow it. Strange to say of all the men of whom he complains, the one he has picked out to hold up to disdain and to scorn, and towards whom in his dying days he seems to have entertained the strongest animosity, was a young man of twenty-eight, who was just then becoming known, and whose fame was to increase somewhat in after years, namely, William Shakespeare. Greene beseeches the three principal friends he still had, Marlowe, Nash, and Peele, to cease writing plays; what is the good of it? others come, turn to account what has been written before them, give never a thank-you for it, and get the praise. Let them stop publishing and these new-comers, among them this "upstart" Shakespeare, unable as they obviously are to invent anything, will have their careers cut short. Be warned by my fate, says Greene, and mind "those puppits ... that speake from our mouths, those anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have been beholding: is it not like that you to whome they all have been beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tigers heart wrapt in a players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Joannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely shake-scene in a countrie. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: and let those apes imitate your past excellence and never more acquaint them with your rare inventions."[120]

This savage abuse of young Shakespeare, who had probably mended at that time more plays than we know, and more, surely, than he had personally written, must not pass without the needful comment that his abuser was, according to his own testimony, as ready, for a trifle, to make an acquaintance and start a friendship as to turn a friend into a foe. "Though," says he, "I knew how to get a friend, yet I had not the gift or reason how to keepe a friend." He quarrelled, in fact, with most of them, not excepting Nash and Marlowe, to whom he is now appealing against Shakespeare; and his prefaces contain numerous attacks on the writers of the time. It must be remembered, too, how bitter was the end of poor Greene, how keenly he felt, he the boon companion par excellence, finding himself "forsaken" in his need, and left alone in the shoemaker's desolate room. It is curious to think that among the men whose absence from his bedside he most resented was Shakespeare, and that this want of a visit whetted his already ill-disposed mind into expressing the only abuse known to have been directed by his contemporaries against the author of "Hamlet."

Shakespeare, of course, did not answer;[121] his plea might have been that if he did not pay much attention to others' authorship, much less did he pay to his own; for he never published his own dramas, nor did he protest when mangled versions of them were circulated by printers. He only showed that Greene's criticisms had not much affected him by turning later on another of the complainer's novels into a drama. Shakespeare's friend, Ben Jonson, who was not accustomed to so much reserve, speaks very disparagingly of Greene; he represents him as being a perfectly forgotten author in 1599, which was untrue, and as for the particular work in which Shakespeare was abused, he describes it as only fit for the reading of crazy persons.

"Trusty. ... Every night they read themselves asleep on those books [one of the two being the "Groats-worth"].

"Epicoene. Good faith it stands with good reason. I would I knew where to procure those books.

"Morose. Oh!

"Sir Amorous La Foole. I can help you with one of them, mistress Morose, the 'Groats-worth of wit.'

"Epicoene. But I shall disfurnish you, Sir Amorous, can you spare it?

"La Foole. O yes, for a week or so; I shall read it myself to him," &c.[122]

With the exception just mentioned, Greene's thoughts were all turned to repentance. He had the consolation of receiving from his wife a kindly message on the eve of his death, "whereat hee greatly rejoiced, confessed that he had mightily wronged her, and wished that hee might see her before he departed. Whereupon, feeling his time was but short, hee tooke pen and inke and wrote her a letter to this effect:

"Sweet wife, as ever there was any good will or friendship betweene thee and mee, see this bearer (my host) satisfied of his debt: I owe him tenne pound, and but for him I had perished in the streetes. Forget and forgive my wronges done unto thee, and Almighty God have mercie on my soule. Farewell till we meet in heaven, for on earth thou shalt never see me more. This 2d of September, 1592. Written by thy dying husband."[123]

He died a day after.

III.

Greene's non-dramatic works are the largest contribution left by any Elizabethan writer to the novel literature of the day. They are of four sorts: his novels proper or romantic love stories, which he called his love pamphlets; his patriotic pamphlets; his conny-catching writings, in which he depicts actual fact, and tells tales of real life forshadowing in some degree Defoe's manner; lastly, his Repentances, of which some idea has already been given.[124]

His love pamphlets, which filled the greatest part of his literary career, connect him with the euphuistic cycle, and he is assuredly one of Lyly's legatees. Possessing a much greater fertility of invention than Lyly, he follows as closely as the original bent of his mind allows him, the manner of his master. He is euphuistic in his style, wise in his advice to his readers, and a great admirer of his own country.

His moral propensities do not lie concealed behind pretty descriptions or adventures; they are stamped on the very first page of each of his books and are expressly mentioned in their titles. In this too, like his master Lyly, he may be considered a precursor of Richardson. He writes his "Mamillia" to entreat gentlemen to beware how, "under the perfect substaunce of pure love, [they] are oft inveigled with the shadowe of lewde luste;" his "Myrrour of Modestie" to show "howe the Lorde delivereth the innocent from all imminent perils and plagueth the bloudthirstie hypocrites with deserved punishments." "Euphues his censure to Philautus" teaches "the vertues necessary in every gentleman;" "Pandosto" shows that "although by the meanes of sinister fortune truth may be concealed, yet by Time in spight of fortune, it is most manifestly revealed."[125] Quiet, wealthy, comfortable Richardson had no better aim, and had, in fact, a very similar one, when he wrote his "Pamela," as he is careful to state on the title-page, "in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes;" and his "Clarissa," to show "the distresses that may attend the misconduct both of parents and children in relation to marriage." Be it said to the praise of both authors and readers, this moral purpose so prominently stated did not in the least frighten the public of ladies, whose suffrage, the two men, different as they were in most things, were especially courting. Richardson's popularity among them needs not to be recalled, and as for Greene, he was stated at the time of his greater vogue to be nothing less than "the Homer of women."[126]

Greene's praise of England is as constant as Lyly's; he is careful to show that whatever appearances may be, he is proud to be a citizen of London, not, after all, of Bohemia; if he represents himself shipwrecked near the coast of an island where, like Robinson Crusoe, he is alone able to swim, finding the country pleasant, he describes it as "much like that faire England the flower of Europe."[127] Euphues' praise of London is matched by Greene's description of its naval power in his "Royal Exchange": "Our citizens of London (Her Majesties royal fleet excepted) have so many shyppes harboured within the Thames as wyll not onelie match with all the argosies, galleyes, galeons and pataches in Venice, but to encounter by sea with the strongest cittie in the whole world."[128] As for foreign women, Greene agrees with Lyly that they all paint their faces, and cannot live without a lover. French women, for example, are "beautifull," it is true, but "they have drugges of Alexandria, minerals of Egypt, waters from Tharsus, paintings from Spaine, and what to doe forsooth? To make them more beautifull then vertuous and more pleasing in the eyes of men then delightful in the sight of God.... Some take no pleasure but in amorous passions, no delight but in madrigals of love, wetting Cupid's wings with rose water, and tricking up his quiver with sweete perfumes."[129]



But Greene's style marked him most indelibly as a pupil of Lyly. He has taken Euphues' ways of speech with all their peculiarities, and has sometimes crowded his tales with such a quantity of similes, metaphors and antitheses as to beat his master himself on his own ground.[130] Here, again, we are in the middle of scorpions, crocodiles, dipsas, and what not. Take, for instance, "Philomela the lady Fitzwaters nightingale;"[131] as it is written expressly for ladies, and dedicated to one of them, and as, in addition, the characters are of high rank, the novel is nearly one unbroken series of similes: "The greener the alisander leaves be, the more bitter is the sappe," says Philip, the jealous husband, to himself; "the salamander is most warm when it lyeth furthest from the fire;" thus his wife may well be as heart-hollow as she seems lip-holy. He charges his friend Lutesio to tempt her, by way of trial. "Lutesio," the lady replies to the young man's declaration, "now I see, the strongest oake hath his sap and his worms [and] that ravens will breed in the fayrest ash." These observations appear unanswerable to Lutesio, and the husband would share his conviction if he did not reflect that "the onix is inwardly most cold, when it is outwardly most hot." The experiment must be tried again, and the friend returns to the charge: "Madam, I have been stung with the scorpion and cannot be helpt or healed by none but by the scorpion."

"I see now," replies the lady to this compliment, "that hemlocke wheresoever it bee planted, will be pestilent [and] that the serpent with the brightest scales shroudeth the most fatall venome." Is there anything more certain? But that does not prevent the halcyon from hatching when the sea is calm, and the phoenix from spreading her wings when the sunbeams shine on her nest. This is what the husband remarks, and, guided by the onyx, the alexander, &c., after a mock trial, he divorces his wife.

What did the people think of it? They thought "all was not golde that glistered, ... that the Agate, bee it never so white without, yet it is full of black strokes within."

During this time, Philomela, the wife who had been driven away, retires to Palermo, where her knowledge of natural history allows her to observe that the more the camomile is trodden on, the faster it grows. Scarcely separated from her, the husband loses his confidence in the onyx and alexander, and sets out in search of her. He does not know her place of retreat, but, happily, among all possible routes, he chooses precisely that leading to Palermo. He finds his wife again, and his joy is so great that he is choked by it, and dies; a just punishment for his confidence in Lyly's botany.[132]

In the same way as patient Grisell's story had been in the same period transferred to the stage, this new example of feminine virtue, from the pen of the "Homer of women," was, in later years, worked into a drama. At that time Greene had long been dead and could not complain of the new "shake-scene" tortures inflicted upon him by Davenport.[133]

This story, characteristic as it is of Greene's style when he means to be euphuistic, can scarcely be taken as a fair sample of the improbability he is able to crowd into a single novel. Most of his tales (and in this he greatly differs from Lyly) take place we do not know when, we do not know where, among men we have never anywhere come across. Learned as he was, versed in the Greek, Latin, French and Italian tongues, able to translate passages from the Italian of Ariosto, to dress in English language the charming "Debat de Folie et d'Amour"[134] of Louise Labe, to imitate (as he thought) Cicero's style, while describing (as he thought) the great orator's loves,[135] his turn of mind was as little critical as can be imagined, and his wide popularity served to spread geographical and historical absurdities, some of which were preserved by Shakespeare himself, for the amusement of a learned posterity. Greene's picture of Ulysses' Penelope is not more Greek than the exquisite painting by Pinturicchio at the National Gallery, where the wise king of Ithaca appears under the guise of a red-hosed Italian youth with flowing hair; while his wife sits at her "web" in a Florentine blue dress. In Greene, Penelope is represented telling stories to while away the time, which, unless we endow her with a prophetical gift, are impossibilities. Her first story begins thus: "Saladyne the Souldan of AEgipt, who by his prowesse had made a generall conquest of the south-east part of ye world tooke to wife Barmenissa, the onely daughter and heire of the great chan." No wonder that such tales could chain the attention and awaken the curiosity of her maids, and keep them quiet till the time when "a messenger came hastily rushing in, who tolde Penelope that Ulisses was arryved that night within the port of Ithaca.... Penelope called for her sonne and that night sent him post to the sea."[136]

Not less wonderful are the stories of "Arbasto," King of Denmark, or of "Pandosto," King of Bohemia. They may be taken as typical specimens of the sort of romantic novel the Elizabethan public enjoyed, and which was sure to make an author popular. We must remember when reading these tales that they were the fashion, the craze, at a time when "Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet" were being played. Chaotic, improbable, and in some parts ridiculous as they appear to us, they would have made their author wealthy if anything could, so much so that, as we have seen, the publishers, according to Nash, considered themselves "blest to pay Greene deare for the very dregs of his wit." He was, if anything, an author that sold. What were his wares?

In "Arbasto" Greene represents himself reaching in his travels the island of Candia. He meets in a cell a solitary old man, and without any ceremony makes bold to ask him for his story. The old man is at first somewhat shocked at this inquisitiveness, and gets very angry; but he grows calmer and complies. He is Arbasto, late King of Denmark, and was once very happy: "I feared not the force of forraigne foes, for I knewe none but were my faithfull friends," says he, in a style that reminds one of the King Herod of miracle-plays. Living in such content, he thought it advisable to invade France, where at that time a king was reigning, named Pelorus, about whom chroniclers are silent. Arbasto came straight to Orleans, and after some siege operations, "had so shaken the walles with cannon shot, that they were forced to strengthen them with counter mures."

A three months' truce is agreed to on both sides, and the two sovereigns entertain each other. At the French court, Arbasto meets the two daughters of the king, Myrania and Doralicia, two wonderful creatures, especially the latter, who was "so adorned with more then earthlie perfection as she seemed to be framed by nature to blemishe nature, and that beautie had skipt beyond her skil in framing a peece of such curious workemanship." Arbasto cannot cease gazing at her; he addresses to himself euphuistic speeches several pages long, but they do him no good. It so happens that while his love is set on Doralicia, the other princess falls in love with him. But this again does him no good. He ceases to find anything worth living for; even the possible destruction of France seems to him tasteless. His nobles observe his changed mood, and wonder, and his confidant, Duke Egerio, vainly tries on him the effect of a new series of euphuistic examples and similes. Arbasto continues loving, and Doralicia perseveres in her coldness; they meet once, and argue one against the other with the help of salamanders and scorpions, and empty their whole herbaria over each other's head; but things remain in statu.

King Pelorus, who, for all that, does not lose his head, offers Arbasto an interview in Orleans to sign the peace. Arbasto comes, the gates are shut, he is thrown into prison; his army is cut to pieces, and a great scaffold is erected in a conspicuous place, on which the prisoner is to be publicly executed in ten days' time.

The royal Dane tries to console himself in his prison with what remains of his herbarium and zoology. But better help comes in the shape of the loving princess, Myrania, who is resolved to save him. By her command her maid entices the gaoler to her room, and causes him to tread "upon a false bord" that had apparently been there in all times, ready for this very emergency. The gaoler falls "up to the shoulders;" then he disappears into a hole, where he dies, and his keys are taken from him.

Arbasto is very happy, and promises Myrania to love and marry her; they go "covertly out of the citie, passing through France with many fearefull perils" and reach Denmark. Pelorus and Doralicia are extremely angry; she even takes to "blaspheming ... but as words breake no bones, so we cared the lesse for her scolding."

But Arbasto learns to his cost that no man when truly in love can cease to love as he pleases. Before keeping his word to Myrania he wants once more to appeal to her fair sister. But the fair sister continues in her blaspheming mood, and sends a very sharp and contemptuous answer.

Both letters fall into the hands of Myrania, who is so struck by this piece of treachery that she dies of her sorrow; hearing which Pelorus rather unexpectedly dies of his sorrow for her death. Doralicia then is queen, and at last discovers that in the innermost part of her heart there is love for Arbasto. She writes accordingly, but the Dane this time returns a contemptuous answer. Receiving which, the poor French queen dies of her sorrow. And thereupon, for no apparent reason, except to add yet more sorrow to the conclusion of this tragical tale, the confidant of the Danish king turns traitor, usurps his crown, and Arbasto goes to Candia, where Greene had the good fortune to hear from his own lips this wondrous and authentic tale. "Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!" as Duke Theseus would think.

However complete the success awarded to Arbasto's adventures, it was nothing compared with the popularity of "Pandosto." If this was not the best it was the most famous of Greene's tales. The plot is well known, for Shakespeare, unmoved by the dying maledictions of his late companion, drew from it the materials of his "Winter's Tale" (1611?). He kept many of the improbabilities of Greene, rejected a few, and added some of his own. But the great change he made was to give life to the heroes, and as they had been shaped by Greene they sorely needed it. Rarely did a more unlikely and a cruder tale come from the pen of our novelist.

The events of the story take place among kings and shepherds: "In the countrey of Bohemia there raygned a king called Pandosto." This is the usual beginning of novels of the time; hundreds of them commence in this manner;[137] the very first lines transport the reader to an unknown country, and place him before an unknown king, and if, after reading only those few words, he is surprised to find himself entangled in extraordinary, inexplicable adventures, he must be of a very naive disposition. But in Elizabethan times adventures were liked for their own sake; probability was only a very secondary motive of enjoyment. "Pandosto," in any case, deserves our attention, for, if it commenced like many other novels of the time, it led, as we have said, to "Winter's Tale," to which it is worth while to go. When the two are read together and compared, it seems as if Shakespeare had chosen on purpose one of the worst of Greene's tales, to show by way of an answer to the accusations of the dead writer, that he was able to form something out of nothing. Greene had, in truth, only modelled the clay; Shakespeare used it, adding the soul.

Greene simply states his facts and takes little trouble about explaining them; the reader must rest satisfied with the author's bare word. There is no attempt at the study of passions; his heroes change their minds all of a sudden, with the stiff, sharp, improbable action of puppets in a show. Pandosto (Leontes) loves and hates, and becomes jealous, and repents always in the same brusque wire-and-wood manner; the warmth of his passions, so great and terrible in Shakespeare, is here simply absent; when he begins to suspect his friend Egistus (Polixenes) of feeling an unlawful love for Bellaria (Hermione), we are barely informed that the Bohemian king "concluded at last to poyson him." When Dorastus and Fawnia (Florizel and Perdita) seek refuge in Pandosto's kingdom, Pandosto at once falls in love with his own daughter, Fawnia, whom he does not know; then on the receipt of a letter from Egistus, "having his former love turned to a disdainful hate," he wishes to have her killed. Very differently is the couple received by Shakespeare's Leontes:

"Were I but twenty-one, Your father's image is so hit in you, His very air, that I should call you brother, As I did him; and speak of something wildly By us performed before. Most dearly welcome! And you, fair princess, goddess!—O, alas, I lost a couple, that 'twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder as You gracious couple do."

In Greene the exquisite figure of Perdita appears as a very rough sketch under the name of Fawnia. She loves her Dorastus not merely because he is lovable, but because "hoping in time to be advaunced from the daughter of a poore farmer to be the wife of a riche king." Dorastus comes to her disguised as a shepherd, and as she does not recognize him "she began halfe to forget Dorastus and to favor this prety shepheard whom she thought shee might both love and obtaine." It would be cruel to make further comparisons, but it is necessary to say thus much in order to show what a hold adventures, however crude, surprises, unexpected meetings and recognitions, had upon Elizabethan minds. They were quite sufficient to insure success; to add life and poetry was very well, but by no means necessary. Shakespeare did so because he could not do otherwise; and he did it thoroughly, as was his wont, endowing with his life-giving faculty the most insignificant personage he found embryo-like in Greene. The least of them has, in Shakespeare, his own moods, his sensitiveness, a mind and a heart that is his and his alone; even young Mamillius, the child who lives only the length of one scene, is not any child, but tells his tale, his sad tale, with a grace that is all his own.

"A sad tale's best for winter. ... I will tell it softly; Yond crickets shall not hear it."

Living people, too, are his Paulina, his Antigonus, his Camillo, his Autolycus, all of them additions of his own creation. Living also, his shepherds, for whom he received only insignificant hints from Greene. In "Pandosto" we hear of "a meeting of all the farmers daughters in Sycilia," without anything more, and from this Shakespeare drew the idea of his sheep-shearing feast, where he delights in contrasting with the rough ways of his peasants the inborn elegance of Perdita: "O Proserpina," says she, in her delicious mythological prattle:

"For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett'st fall From Dis's wagon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares ..."

And Florizel, wondering at her with his young admiring eyes, answers in the same strain:

"When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it ever; when you sing, I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms; Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that."

Very different is the old shepherd's tone; though kindly, it is quite conformable to his estate and situation:

"Fie, daughter! when my old wife lived, upon This day she was both pantler, butler, cook, Both dame and servant; welcomed all, served all, Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here, At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle; On his shoulder and his; her face o' fire With labour, and the thing she took to quench it, She would to each one sip. You are retired, As if you were a feasted one, and not The hostess of the meeting."

Never has the language of country people been better transferred to literature; their manners, tone, and language in Shakespeare have remained true to nature even to the present day, so much so that it is difficult, while writing, not to think of harvest and vintage scenes, which every year brings round again in our French valleys, and the sort of kindly talk very similar to the old shepherd's that many of us remember, as well as I do, to have heard in the country, from peasant associates in early days. This unsurpassed fidelity to nature is the more remarkable as it dates from the Arcadian times of English literature, days that were to last long, even down to the time of Pope and of Thomson himself, to stop at Burns, when at last a deeper, if not truer, note was to be struck.

But with regard to mere facts, Shakespeare was in no way more careful than Greene, and he seems to have known, and it was in fact visible enough, the greediness of his public to be such that, ostrich like, they would swallow anything. He, therefore, changed very little. In Greene, ships "sail into Bohemia," a feat that cannot be repeated to-day; the Queen is tried by a jury "panelled" for that purpose; the nobles go "to the isle of Delphos, there to enquire of the oracle of Apollo whether she had committed adultery." Very much the same things happen in Shakespeare. The survival of Hermione is his own invention; in Greene she dies for good at the beginning of the novel, when she hears of the death of her son. With the same aptitude to die for no other cause than to improve a story, Pandosto dies also in Greene's tale: he remembered his faults and "fell in a melancholie fit, and to close up the comedie with a tragicall stratageme he slewe himselfe." Merry and tragical! But otherwise Dorastus and Fawnia would have had to wait before becoming king and queen, and such a waiting was against the taste of the time and the rules of novel writing.

Such as it is, Greene's tale had an extraordinary success. While Shakespeare's drama was not printed, either in authentic or pirated shape, before the appearance of the 1623 folio, the prose story had a number of editions throughout the seventeenth century and even, under one shape or another, throughout the eighteenth. It was printed as a chap-book during this last period, and in this costume began a new life. It was turned into verse in 1672, under the title, "Fortune's tennis ball: or the most excellent history of Dorastus and Fawnia, rendred into delightful english verse";[138] it begins with this "delightful" invocation:

"Inspire me gentle love and jealousie, Give me thy passion and thy extasie, While to a pleasant ayr I strik the strings Singing the fates of lovers and of kings."

But the highest and most extraordinary compliment to Greene's performance was its translation into French, not only once, as has been said, but twice. The first time was at a moment when the English language and literature were practically unknown and as good as non-extant to French readers. It appeared in 1615, and was dedicated to "tres haute and tres illustre princesse, Madame Christine Soeur du Roy."[139] The second translation, that has never yet been noticed, was made at a time when France had a novel literature of its own well worth reading, and when Boileau had utterly routed and discomfited the writers of romantic and improbable tales. Nevertheless, it was thought that a public would be found in Paris for Greene's novel, and it was printed accordingly in French in 1722, this time adorned with engravings.[140] They show "Doraste" dressed as a marquis of Louis XV.'s time; while "Pandolphe" wears a flowing wig under his cocked hat, and sits on a throne in rococo style. A copy of the book was purchased for the royal library, and is still to be seen at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, with the crown and cipher of his Most Christian Majesty on the cover.

Greene's story of "Menaphon"[141] is hardly more probable, but it takes place in the country of Arcadia, a fact that predisposes us to treat with indulgence any lack of reality; moreover, it contains touches of true poetry, and is perhaps, all considered, the best of Greene's romantic novels. In common with most of this author's tales it abounds in monologues and dialogues; heroes think aloud and let us into their secret thoughts, a device adapted from the classic drama and very common in all the English novels of the period. There is also, according to Greene's custom, a great abundance of songs and verses, the best piece being the lullaby quoted above. Propriety and the truth of characters are not much better observed here than in Greene's other stories. Everybody in this romance speaks with infinite grace and politeness. The shepherd Menaphon, introducing himself to the Princess Sephestia and her child, who have been cast ashore through a shipwreck, says to them: "Strangers, your degree I know not, therefore pardon if I give lesse title than your estates merit." And, falling desperately in love with the beautiful young woman, who gives as her name Samela of the island of Cyprus, he describes to her with ardour and not without grace the pastoral life that he would like to lead with her: "I tell thee, faire nymph, these plaines that thou seest stretching southward, are pastures belonging to Menaphon: ther growes the cintfoyle, and the hyacinth, the cowsloppe, the primrose and the violet, which my flockes shall spare for flowers to make thee garlands, the milke of my ewes shall be meate for thy pretie wanton, the wool of the fat weathers that seemes as fine as the fleece that Jason fet from Colchos, shall serve to make Samela webbes withall; the mountaine tops shall be thy mornings walke, and the shadie valleies thy evenings arbour: as much as Menaphon owes shall be at Samelas command if she like to live with Menaphon."

The romance goes on its way, strewn with songs whose refrains of varied and tuneful metres afford charming melody. In the end two knights, Melicertus and Pleusidippus, both enamoured of Sephestia, fight a duel; they are separated. The king of the country interferes, and comprehending nothing of these intricate love affairs, he is on the point of cutting off all their heads, when it is discovered that Melicertus is the long lost husband of Sephestia; the other duellist is the child of the shipwrecked woman, who, in the course of the tale, has been stolen from her on the shore and has grown up in hiding. They embrace one another; and, as for Menaphon, whose sweetheart finds herself thus provided with a sufficiently fond husband and son, he returns to his old love, Pesana, who had had patience to wait for him, doubtless without growing old: for, in these romances, people do not grow old. Pleusidippus has become a man, without the least change in his mother's face; she has remained as beautiful as in the first page of the book, and is, according to appearances, still "sweet-and-twenty."

In his tales of this sort Greene was mostly describing delights with which he was not personally acquainted, lands of which he had no practical knowledge, princely adventures for which no historian could vouch. He was perfectly free and unimpeded. The taste of the public was similar to his; no Boileau was there to stop him, and he wrote accordingly, following his fancy, not caring in the least for nature and possibility, letting his pen go as fast as it would, and turning out "in a night and a day" a tale like his "Menaphon." But if he did not choose to paint from life and to describe realities in his "love pamphlets," he did so on purpose, not because he was unable to do it. In several of his other writings his subject was such that the work would have been nothing if not true; and there we find a clear view of human passions, foibles and peculiarities, which show that if the taste of the romance readers of the time had been such as to encourage him in this line, he would have proved no mean realistic novelist. His Repentances abound in portraits and scenes, showing the keen eye he had for realities. His conny-catching literature is full of exact descriptions of the sordid life of the sharpers and low courtesans of Elizabethan London. In more than one of these pamphlets he foreshadows, though I need not say with a much lesser genius, the "Moll Flanders" and the "Colonel Jack" of a later period. The resemblance is especially great in the "Life and death of Ned Browne,"[142] in which the hero, according to the custom in picaresque novels, of which more hereafter, himself tells his own story in the first person. Greene is particularly bitter in his denunciations of the professional courtesans of London, about whom he knew probably more than any of his contemporaries. But with all the hatred he felt towards them so long as he had pen in hand, he cannot help repeating that, however objectionable they are in many ways, they have for themselves this advantage, that they are extremely beautiful, so that if their morals are exactly the same as in other countries they excel at least in something which in itself is not contemptible. They are "a kinde of women bearing the faces of Angels, but the hearts of devils, able to intrap the elect if it were possible."[143] Greene had no pretension to be one of the elect, and was only too often "intraped"; but for all his miseries his words show a scarcely less intense admiration for his diabolical angels than Des Grieux's famous rapturous phrase when he meets Manon on her way to the ship that is to convey her to America: "Son linge etait sale et derange; ses mains delicates exposees a l'injure de l'air; enfin tout ce compose charmant, cette figure capable de ramener l'univers a l'idolatrie, paraissait dans un desordre et un abattement inexprimables." "Again," writes Greene: "let me say this much, that our curtizans ... are far superiour in artificiall allurement to them of all the world, for, although they have not the painting of Italie, nor the charms of France, nor the jewelles of Spaine, yet they have in their eyes adamants that wil drawe youth as the jet the strawe.... Their lookes ... containe modesty, mirth, chastity, wantonness and what not."[144]

Besides the personal reminiscences with which he made up his repentance tales and stories, Greene as an observer of human nature is seen at his best in his curious, and at the time famous, dialogue "between velvet breeches and cloth breeches."[145] It is in fact a disputation between old England and new England; the England that built the strong houses praised by Harrison, and the England that adorned itself with the Burghley House paper work; traditional England and italianate England. Velvet breeches is "richly daubde with gold, and poudred with pearle," and is "sprung from the auncient Romans, borne in Italy, the mistresse of the worlde for chivalry." Cloth breeches is of English manufacture and descent, and deplores the vices that have crept into "this glorious Iland" in the wake of Italian fashions. Both plead before Greene, each giving very graphic accounts of the behaviour of the other. Here, for example, is a scene, assuredly from the life, at a barber's shop:

"Velvet breeches he sittes downe in the chaire wrapt in fine cloathes ... then comes [the barber] out with his fustian eloquence, and making a low conge, saith:



"Sir, will you have your wor[ship's] haire cut after the Italian maner, shorte and round, and then frounst with the curling yrons, to make it looke like a halfe moone in a miste? or like a Spanyard, long at the eares and curled like the two endes of an old cast periwig? or will you be Frenchified, with a love locke downe to your shoulders, wherein you may weare your mistresse favour? The English cut is base and gentlemen scorne it, novelty is daintye; speake the woord sir, and my sissars are ready to execute your worships wil.

"His head being once drest, which requires in combing and rubbing some two howers, hee comes to the bason: then being curiously washt with no woorse then a camphire bal, he descends as low as his berd, and asketh whether he please to be shaven or no, whether he will have his peak cut short and sharpe, amiable like an inamorato, or broad pendant like a spade, to be terrible like a warrior and a Soldado ... if it be his pleasure to have his appendices primed or his mustachios fostered to turn about his eares like ye branches of a vine...."

The question pending between cloth and velvet is submitted to a jury; men of the various professions are called and accepted, or rejected, according to their merit; each is described, often in a very lively manner. Here is, for example, the portrait of a poet or rather of the poet of the Elizabethan period; for the specimen here represented stands as a type for all his class; and it is worth notice, for if Shakespeare himself was different, many of his associates at the "Mermaid," we may be sure, well answered the description. "I espied far off a certain kind of an overworne gentleman, attired in velvet and satin; but it was somewhat dropped and greasie, and bootes on his legges, whose soles wexed thin and seemed to complaine of their maister, which treading thrift under his feet, had brought them unto that consumption. He walked not as other men in the common beaten way, but came compassing circumcirca, as if we had beene divells and he would draw a circle about us, and at every third step he looked back as if he were afraid of a baily or a sarjant." Cloth Breeches, who seems to be describing here Greene himself, is not too severe in his appreciation of the character of the poor troubled fellow: "If he have forty pound in his purse together, he puts it not to usury, neither buies land nor merchandise with it, but a moneths commodity of wenches and capons. Ten pound a supper, why tis nothing if his plough goes and his ink horne be cleere ... But to speak plainely I think him an honest man if he would but live within his compasse, and generally no mans foe but his own. Therefore I hold him a man fit to be of my jury."

Judgment is passed in favour of cloth England against velvet England; and in this ultra-conservative sentence the views of the Bohemian novelist are summed up in this premature essay on the "philosophy of clothes."

IV.

The fame and success of Greene encouraged writers to follow his example. He had shown that there was a public for novels, and that it was a sort of literature that would pay, both in reputation and money. He had, therefore, many rivals and imitators who were thus only second-hand disciples of Lyly. Among these Nicholas Breton and Emmanuel Ford may be taken as examples. Both were his contemporaries, but survived him many years. In both traces of euphuism survive, but they are faint; at the time they wrote euphuism was on the wane, and it is only on rare occasions that Ford reminds us that "the most mightie monarch Alexander, aswel beheld the crooked counterfeit of Vulcan as the sweet picture of Venus. Philip of Macedon accepted...."[146]

What Ford especially imitated from Greene was the art of writing romantic tales with plenty of adventures, unexpected meetings and discoveries, much love, and improbabilities enough to enchant Elizabethan readers and sell the book up to any number of editions. In this he rivalled his model very successfully, and his romances were among the most popular of the time of Shakespeare. The number of their editions was extraordinary, and they were renewed at almost regular intervals up to the eighteenth century; there was a far greater demand for them than for any play of Shakespeare.[147] Besides imitating Greene, who obviously revealed to him the success to be won by writing romantic tales, he imitated at the same time the Italians and the Spaniards, introducing into his romances a licentiousness quite unknown to Greene, but well known to Boccaccio, and heroic adventures similar to those his friend Anthony Munday was just then putting into English. These last were to be the chief delight of novel-readers in the seventeenth century, and did more than anything for the great popularity of Ford's novels during that period.

Ford's earliest and most characteristic work was called "Parismus, the renowned prince of Bohemia ... conteining his noble battailes fought against the Persians ... his love to Laurana ... and his straunge adventures in the desolate Iland," &c., &c.[148] As the title informs us there are loves and wars in this romance, deeds of valour and of sorcery, there are pageants and enchanters. The adventures take place in purely imaginary lands, which the author is pleased to call Bohemia, Persia, &c., but which might have been as well baptized Tartary or Mongolia. The manners and costumes, however, when there is an attempt at describing them, are purely Elizabethan. There are masques such as were shown at court in Shakespeare's time, and during one such fete, as in "Romeo and Juliet," Parismus for the first time declares his love to Laurana: "The maskers entred in this sort: first entred two torch bearers, apparelled in white satten, beset with spangles of gold, after whom followed two Eunuches, apparelled all in greene, playing on two instruments, then came Parismus attired all in carnation satten ... next followed ... when came two knights ... next followed ..."[149] and so on; in the same style as in Shakespeare's play, "enter Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, with five or six maskers, torch-bearers and others."[150] But, alas, this is the only place where there is any resemblance between the two styles; though the situation developes under Ford's pen in a manner to suggest that he must have read "Romeo" not without a purpose. Had his purpose been to show his contemporaries the height of Shakespeare's genius by giving, side by side with it, the measure of an ordinary mind, he could not have tried better nor succeeded less. For contemporaries and successors consumed innumerable editions of "Parismus," and only too easily numbered editions of "Romeo."

Parismus and Laurana talk, in the midst of the ball, of their new-born love, and after an exchange of highly polite phrases she thus confesses her feelings: "My noble lord ... I heartily thanke you for taking so much paines for my sake, being unwoorthie thereof, and also unable to bee sufficiently thankfull unto you for the same, and for that you say your happinesse resteth in my power, if I can any way work your content to the uttermost of my endeavour I will do it." Parismus, of course, has nothing to answer except that no one could require more.

It had been, however, with her also, love at first sight; but Laurana does not say:

"Go, ask his name: if he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed."

She is far too well bred and courtly, and she explains as follows what she has felt: "My Lord, I assure you, that at such time as I sawe you comming first into this court, my heart was then surprised, procured, as I think by the destinies, that ever since I have vowed to rest yours." This speech is made at a nightly garden meeting, similar to the one where Romeo went "with love's light wings," and where was heard the sweetest and gravest lovers' music that ever enchanted human ears:

"At lovers' perjuries, They say Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo, If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully: Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I will frown and be perverse.... Well, do not swear: although I joy in thee, I have no joy of this contract to-night. It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be Ere one can say, It lightens." ...

He of Bohemia had not come with "love's light wings," but "somewhat before the hour, was gone forth in his night gowne, with his sworde under his arme, and comming to the gate he was wont to goe in at into the gardeine, found it shut, and having no other meanes, he gott over the wall." We picture him clambering over the wall, his night-gown flowing about him to do duty for love's wings. The lovers meet, and "thus they spent the night in kinde salutations and curteous imbracings to the unspeakable joy and comfort of them both."

To complete the external resemblance of the two situations, there is in Ford's novel a young lord to play the part of "County Paris." He is called Sicanus, and Laurana's family greatly favours his suit: "Laurana, my cheefest care is to see thee married, according to thy state, which hath made me send for thee, to know whether thou hast alreadie placed thy affection or no: otherwise there is come into this country, a knight of great estate," &c., &c. "Laurana departed with a heavie heart."

Then again, as in "Romeo," there is another meeting of the lovers, this time in Laurana's chamber; and they spend the hours "in sweete greetings, but farre from anie thought of unchastnesse, their imbracings being grounded upon the most vertuous conditions that might bee: and sitting together upon the beds side, Laurana told him...." As in Romeo, they are parted by morn:

"Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark.... —It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.... —Yond light is not daylight...."

A very different morn shines in at Laurana's windows: "Nowe the dismall houre of their parting being approached, by reason of the light that the sunne began to give into the chamber, Parismus taking Laurana in his armes, drawing sweete breath from her lippes, told her that now, to his greefe, he must leave her to be courted by his enemie."

Without any very great grief on our side we shall leave them to follow from this point a series of adventures very different from Romeo's. Parismus becomes a chief of outlaws, and acquires great fame under the name of the Black Knight; he wages war against Sicanus, he encounters young Violetta, and their meetings read like a tale from Boccaccio rather than like a play of Shakespeare; at last he marries Laurana "with admirable pompe" in the "temple of Diana." We shall leave them in this holy place, though many more adventures are in store for them. We shall only state that Ford, encouraged by the great success of this first attempt, wrote several other novels exactly in the same style, containing the same improbable monsters and wonders, and the same licentious adventures. In spite, however, of the condemnation he suffered at the hands of wise people on account of the undeniable immorality of several of his episodes, his reputation went on increasing for years and long survived him.[151]

Another follower of Greene was Nicholas Breton,[152] eighteen years his senior; but he did not begin novel-writing until after the death of his model, when this kind of literature had taken a firm hold of the public. Very little euphuism remains in Breton; we do not find in him those clusters of similes with which Lyly and Greene were fond of adorning their novels, and alliteration is there only to remind us that through Greene, Breton may be considered a secondary legatee of Lyly. The subjects and the form of his writings, much better than his style, prove him a pupil of Greene. He imitated his dialogues, publishing in succession his conference "betwixt a scholler and an angler," his discussion between "wit and will"; his disputation of a scholar and a soldier, "the one defending learning, the other martiall discipline," and several others on travels, on court and country, &c. He imitated Greene's tales of low life, anticipating in his turn Defoe's novels, with his "Miseries of Mavillia;" he remained, however, far below the level not only of Defoe, but of Greene, whose personal knowledge of the misfortunes he was describing enabled him to give in his writings of this kind pictures of reality that contrasted strangely with the fanciful incidents of his romantic novels. The only things worth remembering in these "miseries," besides their subject, are a few thoughtful observations such as the one (in alliterative style) which opens the story: "Sorrow sokes long ere it slayes; care consumes before it killes; and destinie drives the body into much miserie, before the heart be strooken dead;" a far juster observation than Greene's fancies, according to which heroes of novels may be got rid of as quickly by sorrow as by poison or apoplexy.

There are also in Breton imitations of the romantic novel of Italian origin such as Greene understood it and such as the Elizabethan public loved it. Breton published in 1600 his "Strange fortunes of two excellent princes," which his modern editor does not hesitate to declare "a bright and characteristic little book." This little masterpiece begins thus, in very characteristic fashion indeed: "In the Ilandes of Balino, neere unto the city of Dulno, there lived a great duke named Firente.... This lord had to wife a sweete ladie called Merilla, a creature of much worth.... This blessed lord and ladie had issue male, onlie one sonne named Penillo and female one onlie daughter named Merilla." These two children were famous for their wit and beauty. "But I will ... entreat of another Duke, who dwelt in the Ilands of Cotasie.... This duke had to name Ordillo, a man famous for much worth as well in wit as valour.... This duke had to wife a gratious ladie.... She had by her lord the duke two blessed children, a sonne and a daughter; her sonne named Fantiro and her daughter Sinilla." These two children begat wonder for their wit and their beauty.

Such is the introduction. What do you think will follow? That the two perfect young men will marry the two unique young women? This is exactly what happens; and the only perceptible interest in the tale is to see from what improbable incidents such likely consequences are derived. We can safely, it seems, class this novel in the same category as "Arbasto," "Mamillia," and other products of Greene's pen; not, however, without remarking that Breton's stories, as well as those of his model, were not meant to delight nurseries, but were destined to give pleasure to grown-up people, to people in society; they were offered them as jucunda oblivia vitae, exactly in the same fashion as the three-volume novels of to-day. Breton himself is positive on this point, and he has been careful to inform us that his intention was to write things "which being read or heard in a winters evening by a good fire, or a summers morning in the greene fields may serve both to purge melancholy from the minde and grosse humours from the body."[153]

Again, he was connected with the Greene and Lyly group by the pleasure he felt in composing imaginary letters. A number of such letters had been inserted by Lyly in his "Euphues," and had proved one of the attractions of the book; Greene and the other novelists of the period never missed an opportunity of making their heroes write to each other, and they always transcribed their letters in full, a process inherited from the romance writers of the Middle Ages. Breton, following the example already given by some of his contemporaries, went beyond that, and published a volume of imaginary letters from everybody to anybody on any subject, many of them rather coarse, some good, some rather slow in their gait and heavy in their wit.[154] The public taste was so decidedly in favour of these compositions that this was the most successful of Breton's enterprises. It was often reprinted; a number of similar collections were circulated in the seventeenth century, and their popularity had not abated when Richardson was asked, by the publishers Osborne and Rivington, to compose one for country people. He did so, and the only difference, and a sufficiently important one, was that in his series the letters were connected by the thread of a story.

Greene had a rival of much higher stature in his friend Thomas Lodge. Lodge was a little older than Greene, and survived him long, so that he happened to be a contemporary both of Greene and of his imitators. He rivalled Greene, but did not imitate him, being himself a direct legatee of Lyly. The sort of life he led differed greatly from that of his friend, but it was scarcely less characteristic of the period. Lodge was the son of a rich London grocer who had been Lord Mayor. Born in 1557, he had known Lyly at Oxford; had studied law; then, yielding to those desires of seeing the dangers and beauties of the world which drove the English youths of the period to seek preferment abroad, he closed his books for a while, and became a corsair, visiting the Canary Isles, Brazil, and Patagonia. He brought back, as booty from his expeditions, romances written at sea to beguile the tedium of the passage and the anxieties of the tempest. One was called "The Margarite of America"; another "Rosalynde." The latter fell into Shakespeare's hands and pleased him; he drew from it the plot of "As you like it."[155] Coming before the literary public, Lodge does not altogether forget his profession of corsair, and in order to deprive the critics of the temptation to sneer, he is careful to brandish his rapier from time to time, and to write prefaces that make one's hair stand on end. "Roome for a souldier and a sailer, that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrote in the Ocean!" he cries to the reader at the beginning of his "Rosalynde," and let fault-finders keep silence; otherwise he will throw them overboard "to feed cods."

After such a warning there would be nothing it seems but to hold our tongue; but perhaps, taking the practical side of the question, we may consider that by this time Lodge's rapier must have grown very rusty, and would not offer more danger than any critic is bound to incur in the performance of his duty. Besides that admiration may in all sincerity be blended with criticism when it is a question of Lodge's masterpiece, "Rosalynde."

The tale itself bears a somewhat curious history. Twice at two hundred years' distance it took the fancy of the greatest genius of the period. In the Middle Ages it was called the "Tale of Gamelyn,"[156] and Chaucer apparently intended to work it into his "Canterbury Tales," but he died before he had completed his wish, and some copy of the rough old poem having, as it seems, been found among his papers, it was in after time inserted in the manuscripts of his works as the "Cooke's Tale." As it stood in the fourteenth century this story recited mere deeds of valour, of strong, sinewy fighters; love and women played no part in it; and it is a great loss for us not to know whether old Chaucer would have made this very necessary addition, and what sort of mediaeval Rosalind he would have depicted.

As things went, we are indebted to our gentleman adventurer for the invention of Rosalind. Lodge took up the tale and remodelled it entirely; he gave place in it to the fair she-page and to her friend Alinda and to Phoebe, the hard-hearted shepherdess, in such a way that when Shakespeare in his turn bethought himself of this story, he had nothing to add to fit it for his own stage, nothing except genius.



But if Lodge cannot be considered a man of genius, he is certainly a writer of very remarkable gifts. His novel is a pastoral tale that takes place somewhere in France, near Bordeaux, and reads as pleasantly as any story in "Astree," no mean compliment. Probability, geography and chronology, are not Lodge's strong points; we are in fact again in the country of nowhere, in an imaginary kingdom of France over which the usurper Torismond reigns. The true king has been deposed and leads a forester's life, untroubled, unknown, in the thick woods of Arden. Rosalind, a daughter of the deposed king, has been kept as a sort of hostage at the court of the tyrant in Bordeaux, presumably his capital. All of a sudden she is exiled in her turn, without more explanation than "I have heard of thy aspiring speaches and intended treasons."[157] Alinda, her friend, the daughter of the tyrant, refuses to leave her, and both fly the court, Rosalind being dressed as a page, a rapier at her side, her wit full of repartees, her mind full of shifts, and equal, in fact, as in Shakespeare, to any emergency. "Tush, quoth Rosalynd, art thou a woman and hast not a sodaine shift to prevent a misfortune? I, thou seest, am of a tall stature, and would very well become the person and apparell of a page; thou shalt bee my mistris, and I will play the man so properly, that, trust me, in what company so ever I come, I will not bee discovered. I will buy mee a suite, and have my rapier very handsomely at my side, and if any knave offer wrong, your page will shew him the point of his weapon. At this Alinda smiled, and upon this they agreed, and presentlie gathered up all their jewels which they trussed up in a casket.... They travailed along the vineyards, and by many by-waies, at last got to the forrest side," the forest of Arden, which at that time happened to be near the vineyards of Gascony.

But this geographical situation is the least of the wonders offered by the forest. In it live not only Gerismond, the lawful king, very happy and contented, free and without care, wanting nothing; but, in the valleys, the most lovable shepherdesses and the most loving shepherds; they feed their flocks while piping their ditties; they inscribe their sonnets on the bark of trees; they are very learned, though mere shepherds; they quote Latin and write French; they know how to ask the god of love that the heart of their mistress may not be "de glace."

"Bien qu'elle ait de neige le sein."

They live in the shade of the most unaccountable woods, woods composed of pine-trees, fig-trees, and lemon-trees. "Then, comming into a faire valley, compassed with mountaines whereon grewe many pleasant shrubbs, they might descrie where two flocks of sheepe did feede. Then looking about they might perceive where an old shepheard sat, and with him a yong swaine, under a covert most pleasantlie scituated. The ground where they sat was diapred with Floras riches, as if she ment to wrap Tellus in the glorie of her vestments: round about, in the forme of an amphitheater were most curiouslie planted pine-trees, interseamed with limons and citrons, which with the thicknesse of their boughes so shadowed the place, that Phoebus could not prie into the secret of that arbour.... Fast by ... was there a fount so christalline and cleere that it seemed Diana and her Driades and Hemadriades had that spring as the secret of all their bathings. In this glorious arbour sat these two shepheards seeing their sheepe feede, playing on their pipes...." It is like a landscape by Poussin. Alinda and her page find the place very pleasant, and decide to settle there, especially when they have heard what a shepherd's life is like. "For a shepheards life, oh! mistresse, did you but live a while in their content, you would saye the court were rather a place of sorrowe than of solace ... Envie stirres not us, wee covet not to climbe, our desires mount not above our degrees, nor our thoughts above our fortunes. Care cannot harbour in our cottages, nor doo our homely couches know broken slumbers." Fine assertions, to which some hundred and fifty years later Prince Rasselas was most solemnly to give the lie. But his time had not yet come, and both princesses resolve to settle there, to purchase flocks, and "live quiet, unknowen, and contented."[158]

Many other pleasant things are to be found in the forest; in fact, the two ladies meet their lovers there; brave Rosader, the Gamelyn of Chaucerian times, the Orlando of Shakespeare, and wicked but repentant and reformed Saladin, who loves Alinda as Rosader loves Rosalind. They meet, too, the shepherdess Phoebe, "as faire as the wanton that brought Troy to ruine," but in a different dress; "she in a peticoate of scarlet, covered with a greene mantle, and to shrowde her from the sunne, a chaplet of roses;" in a different mood, too, towards shepherds, thinking nothing of her Paris, poor Montanus whom she disdains while he is dying for her.

Yet there were even more wonders in this forest of Arcadian shepherds, exiled princesses, and lemon-trees. There were "certaine rascalls that lived by prowling in the forrest, who for feare of the provost marshall had caves in the groves and thickets";[159] there were lions, too, very dangerous, hungry, man-eating lions. Such animals appear in Shakespeare also, as well as "palm trees," and Shakespeare moreover takes the liberty of doubling his lion with a serpent.

"A wretched ragged man o'ergrown with hair Lay sleeping on his back: about his neck A green and gilded snake had wreath'd itself Who with her head, nimble in threats, approach'd The opening of his mouth; but suddenly, Seeing Orlando, it unlink'd itself, And with indented glides did slip away Into a bush: under which bush's shade A lioness, with udders all drawn dry, Lay couching."[160]

Let us not be too much troubled; here will be good opportunities for lovers to show the sort of men they are, to be wounded, but not disfigured, and finally to be loved.

So many rare encounters of men and animals, and shepherds and lovers, give excellent occasions for Rosalind to display the special turn of her mind, and if, in Lodge, she has not all the ready wit that Shakespeare has given her, she is by no means slow of speech; she possesses besides much more of that human kindness in which we sometimes find the brilliant page of the play a little deficient. The conversations between her and Alinda are very pleasant to read, and show how at last, not only on the stage, but even in novels, the tongues of the speakers had been loosened.

"No doubt, quoth Aliena,[161] this poesie is the passion of some perplexed shepheard, that being enamoured of some fair and beautifull shepheardesse suffered some sharpe repulse, and therefore complained of the cruelty of his mistris.

"You may see, quoth Ganimede [Rosalind's page-name], what mad cattell you women be, whose hearts sometimes are made of adamant that will touch with no impression, and sometimes of waxe that is fit for everie forme; they delight to be courted and then they glorie to seeme coy, and when they are most desired, then they freeze with disdaine....

"And I pray you, quoth Aliena, if your roabes were off, what mettall are you made of that you are so satyricall against women?... Beware, Ganimede, that Rosader heare you not....

"Thus, quoth Ganimede, I keepe decorum, I speake now as I am Alienas page, not as I am Gerismonds daughter; for put me but into a peticoate, and I will stand in defiance to the uttermost, that women are courteous, constant, virtuous, and what not."

Thus there is much merry prattle between these two, especially when the presence of the lover of the one sharpens the teasing disposition of the other; when, for example, Rosader finding, not without good cause, some resemblance between the page and his Rosalind, pities the former, for not equalling the perfection of his mistress.

"He hath answered you, Ganimede, quoth Aliena, it is inough for pages to waite on beautifull ladies and not to be beautifull themselves.

"Oh! mistres," answers the she-page, who cannot help feeling some spite, "holde your peace, for you are partiall; who knowes not, but that all women have desire to tie sovereigntie to their peticoats, and ascribe beautie to themselves, where if boyes might put on their garments, perhaps they would proove as comely; if not as comely, it may be more curteous."

There are also some morning scenes full of pleasant mirth and cheerful light, in which perhaps there is more of Phoebus than of the sun, and more of Aurora than of the dawn; but this light, such as it is, is worth the looking at, so merrily it shines; and the talk of these early risers well suits the half-classic landscape.

"The sunne was no sooner stept from the bed of Aurora, but Aliena was wakened by Ganimede, who restlesse all night, had tossed in her passions; saying it was then time to goe to the field to unfold their sheepe.

"Aliena ... replied thus: What? wanton, the sun is but new up, and as yet Iris riches lies folded in the bosom of Flora; Phoebus hath not dried the pearled deaw, and so long Coridon hath taught me it is not fit to lead the sheepe abroad lest the deaw being unwholesome they get the rot. But now see I the old proverbe true ..." (and here comes some euphuism).

"Come on," answers Ganimede, who does not seem in a mood to appreciate euphuism just then, "this sermon of yours is but a subtiltie to lie still a bed, because either you think the morning colde, or els I being gone, you would steale a nappe; this shifte carries no palme, and therefore up and away. And for Love, let me alone; Ile whip him away with nettles and set Disdaine as a charme to withstand his forces; and therefore, looke you to your selfe; be not too bolde, for Venus can make you bend; nor too coy, for Cupid hath a piercing dart that will make you cry Peccavi.