Greene and Lodge illustrate very well the characteristics of Elizabethan story-telling. _Pandosto_, _Rosalynde_, and some of Greene's confessions let us know pretty clearly what it was that the public of the day found interesting. Greene was a Bohemian, 'with a jolley red peaked beard' who could 'yark up a pamphlet in a single night,' and do it so well that the booksellers were glad to pay 'for the very dregs of his wit.' Lodge was an undergraduate at Oxford, a pirate, and later a very successful physician. Both were, like their audiences, exceedingly alive. [Romance and confession.] In Greene's _Pandosto_ we find reminiscences of old romance, classical nomenclature, the influence of the Italian _novelle_, and plenty of the wild improbability that still had power over his audience. _Pandosto_ is a love pamphlet, and after a euphuistic dedication and a little preface on jealousy, 'from which oft ensueth bloody revenge as this ensuing history manifestly proveth,' Greene leads off with, 'In the country of Bohemia there reigned a king called Pandosto.' Bohemia is an island--no matter. Pandosto, in a most obliging manner, 'to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,' slays himself at the finish--no matter again. We must remember that for the Elizabethans, fortunate people who believed in the Lamia and the Boas, probability and improbability had no existence as relative terms. Everything was credible, and one of the joys of romance reading was the exercise of an athletic faith. Another was the gathering of knowledge, and Greene met this demand with books whose breathings of realism illustrate, like Nash's _Jacke Wilton_, the rogue novel in England, and give his name a double importance. These other books were more personal to their writer, and depend more closely on his own life and character. Greene was a wild liver with a conscience. He enjoyed debauch and the company of rogues better than virtue and the society of sober citizens. But his conscience oscillated between hibernation and wakefulness with a periodicity that corresponded to the fulness and emptiness of his purse, and in times of poverty and righteousness he wrote confessions of his own misdoing, and books on the methods of rapscallions with whom he consorted, that brought him the money to continue on his riotous career, and satisfied the curiosity of his public as well as his romances had delighted their imaginations. Lodge, although his work was also various, appealed mainly to the latter.