own account begun his London life, and his earliest extant literary production was in hand as early as 1580. He now became "an author of playes and a penner of love-pamphlets, so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie, that who for that trade growne so ordinary about London as Robin Greene?" "Glad was that printer," says Nashe, "that might bee so blest to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit." By his own account he rapidly sank into the worst debaucheries of the town, though Nashe declares that he never knew him guilty of notorious crime. He was not without passing impulses towards a more righteous and sober life, and was derided in consequence by his associates as a "Puritane and Presizian." It is possible that he, as well as his bitter enemy, Gabriel Harvey, exaggerated the looseness of his conduct. His marriage, which took place in 1585 or 1586, failed to steady him; if Francesco, in Greene's pamphlet _Never too late to mend_ (1590), is intended for the author himself, it had been a runaway match; but the fiction and the autobiographical sketch in the _Repentance_ agree in their account of the unfaithfulness which followed on the part of the husband. He lived with his wife, whose name seems to have been Dorothy ("Doll"; and cf. Dorothea in _James IV._), for a while; "but forasmuch as she would perswade me from my wilful wickednes, after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage-money which I obtained by her. Then left I her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire, and I to London," where his reputation as a playwright and writer of pamphlets of "love and vaine fantasyes" continued to increase, and where his life was a feverish alternation of labour and debauchery. In his last years he took it upon himself to make war on the cutpurses and "conny-catchers" with whom he came into contact in the slums, and whose doings he fearlessly exposed in his writings. He tells us how at last he was friendless "except it were in a fewe alehouses," where he was respected on account of the score he had run up. When the end came he was a dependant on the charity of the poor and the pitying love of the unfortunate. Henri Murger has drawn no picture more sickening and more pitiful than the story of Greene's death, as told by his Puritan adversary, Gabriel Harvey--a veracious though a far from unprejudiced narrator. Greene had taken up the cudgels provided by the Harvey brothers on their intervention in the Marprelate controversy, and made an attack (immediately suppressed) upon Gabriel's father and family in the prose-tract _A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, or a Quaint Dispute between Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches_ (1592). After a banquet where the chief guest had been Thomas Nashe--an old associate and perhaps a college friend of Greene's, any great intimacy with whom, however, he seems to have been anxious to disclaim--Greene had fallen sick "of a surfeit of pickle herringe and Rennish wine." At the house of