So much for the continuation of Lyly's fame. As for the period of imitation proper, the era of euphuism's full glory, it lasted, as we have said, hardly more than twelve or at most fifteen years. But it saw the birth of works that are not without importance in the history of the origin of the novel in this country.

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 Mürger 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 Mürger.

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 "Scènes de la vie de Bohème" 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 "Ephœbus" 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:

"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:

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]