Unbelief, as we have seen, however, there certainly was; and it is recorded that Walter, Earl of Essex, on his deathbed at Dublin in 1576, murmured that among his countrymen neither Popery nor Protestantism prevailed: "there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity; atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion." [6] And when we turn aside from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature we see clearly what is partly visible from those paths--a number of freethinking variations from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw, found some semblance of atheism shockingly common among the travelled upper class of his day; and the testimonies continue. Edward Kirke, writing his "glosses" to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in 1578, observes that "it was an old opinion, and yet is continued in some men's conceit, that men of years have no fear of God at all, or not so much as younger folk," experience having made them skeptical. Erasmus, he notes, in his Adages makes the proverb "Nemo senex metuit Jovem" signify merely that "old men are far from superstition and belief in false Gods." But Kirke insists that, "his great learning notwithstanding, it is too plain to be gainsaid that old men are much more inclined to such fond fooleries than younger men," [7] apparently meaning that elderly men in his day were commonly skeptical about divine providence. Other writers of the day do not limit unbelief to the aged. Lilly, in his Euphues (1578), referring to England in general or Oxford in particular as Athens, asks: "Be there not many in Athens which think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection?" Further, he complains that "it was openly reported of an old man in Naples that there was more lightness in Athens than in all Italy ... more Papists, more Atheists, more sects, more schisms, than in all the monarchies in the world"; [8] and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of "Euphues and Atheos," in which the latter, "monstrous, yet tractable to be persuaded," [9] is converted with a burlesque facility. Lilly, who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a poor witness as to the atheistic arguments current; but those he cites are so much better than his own, up to the point of terrified collapse on the atheist's part, that he had doubtless heard them. The atheist speaks as a pantheist, identifying deity with the universe; and readily meets a simple appeal to Scripture with the reply that "whosoever denieth a godhead denieth also the Scriptures which testifie of him." [10] But in one of his own plays, played in 1584, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current controversy in a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so contemptuously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In Campaspe (i, 3) he introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle, Cleanthes, Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning "natural causes" and "supernatural effects." Aristotle is made to