There remain for consideration, and in most part for dismissal, a few traditions that have grown up about the name of Greene. Early biographers, among whom was Dyce, attempted to show that Greene had at one time been a minister. This opinion was partly based upon the two manuscript notes on a copy of _George-a-Greene_: "Written by ... a minister who acted the piner's pt in it himselfe. Teste W. Shakespeare," and "Ed. Juby saith that ye play was made by Ro. Greene." Aside from the fact that these notes are not shown to have any authority, and may, in fact, contradict each other, the probabilities are all against the hypothesis that Greene was ever a minister. Nowhere in his singularly open personal revelations does he suggest that he ever acted as such. Indeed, his expressions are inconsistent with such an idea. "In all my life I never did any good," he writes in his _Repentance_, and in the same tract he tells of that incipient conversion that was nipped in the bud by the ridicule of his fellows. Surely this account does not sound like the confession of an ex-minister, and these same copesmates would certainly not have maintained silence had they known that Greene had held a living. Considerations of time make it impossible that Greene should have been the Robert Greene who, in 1576, was one of the Queen's chaplains, for at this time he could not have been more than eighteen years old; nor is it at all likely that he is the Greene who, in 1584-5, was vicar of Tollesbury in Essex, for in these years he was engaged in the unclerical exercise of preparing for printing _The Mirror of Modesty, Morando The Tritameron of Love, The Card of Fancy,_ and _Planetomachia_. The theory that Greene was an actor is traced back to the manuscript notes already quoted, and to some ambiguous remarks by Harvey in his _Four Letters_. Fleay's ingenious conjecture that Greene is identical with that Rupert Persten who accompanied Leicester's company to Saxony and Denmark in 1585-87, and that this name is equivalent to "Robert the Parson," is discredited on philological grounds as well as for its general lack of weight. That Greene may have now and then assumed a part upon the stage is quite possible; but that he never associated himself with the actor's calling is made quite clear from his contemptuous treatment of actors in the passages already quoted. It is perhaps not entirely necessary to dismiss the theory, based on the entry on the title-page of _Planetomachia_, "By Robert Greene, Master of Arts and student in physic," that Greene had intended to study medicine, and was hindered from pursuing his purpose by his success in literature. It is likely, however, that Greene here uses the term "physic" in the sense of "natural philosophy," as it was used by Chaucer and Gower, and that he had particular desire to defend his ability to treat an astronomical topic such as that of _Planetomachia_. * * * * *