native atmosphere, the praises and flattery of a fickle world of fashion. But, time-server as he was, he was no sycophant. Leaving de Vere's service after a sharp quarrel, he was not ashamed to take up the profession of teaching in which he had already had some experience. We see him next, therefore, a master of St Paul's, engrossed in the not unpleasant duties of drilling his pupils for the performance of his plays, accompanying their songs on his instrument, or himself taking his place on the stage, now as Diogenes in his ubiquitous tub, and now as the golden-bearded and long-eared Midas. And last of all he appears as the disappointed, disillusioned man, "infelix academicus ignotus." A wife and children on his hands, his occupation gone, his hopes of the Revels Mastership blasted, he becomes desperate, and writes that last bitter letter to Elizabeth. [134] From the _Preface_. The man of fashion out of date, the social success left high and dry by the unheeding current, he died eventually in poverty, not because he had wasted his substance, like Greene, in Bohemia, but because, thinking to take Belgravia by storm, he had forgotten that the foundations of that city are laid on the bodies of her sons. But leaving "The thrice three muses mourning for the death Of Learning late deceased in beggary," let us look more closely into the character of this man, whose brilliant and successful youth was followed by so sad an old age. In spite of Professor Raleigh and the moralizing of _Euphues_, we may decide that there was nothing of the Puritan about him. His life at Oxford, his attachment to the notorious de Vere, the keen pleasure he took in the things of this world, are, I think, sufficient to prove this. His general attitude towards life was one of vigorous hedonism, not of intellectual asceticism. The ethical element of _Euphues_ links him rather to the already vanishing Humanism than to the rising Puritanism, against which all his sympathies were enlisted, as his contributions to the _Marprelate_ controversy indicate. I have refrained from touching upon these _Mar-Martin_ tracts because they possess neither aesthetic nor dynamical importance, being, as Gabriel Harvey--always ready with the spiteful epigram--describes them, "alehouse and tinkerly stuffe, nothing worthy a scholar or a real gentleman." They are worth mentioning, however, as throwing a light upon the religious prejudices of our author. He was a courtier and he was a churchman, and in lending his aid to crush sectarians he thought no more deeply about the matter than he did in voting as Member of Parliament against measures which conflicted with his social inclinations. There was probably not an ounce of the theological spirit in his whole composition; for his refutation of atheism was a youthful essay in dialectics, a bone thrown to the traditions of the moral Court treatise.