Lyric poet tempted or driven by necessity on to the stage is the description which must be given of two of his contemporaries, who in other respects differed from him very widely--Robert Greene and George Peele. If we are bound to take his own confessions, and the abuse poured on his grave by that bad-blooded pedant Gabriel Harvey, quite seriously, we are compelled to believe that Greene ended a thoroughly despicable life by a very sordid death. But a little wholesome scepticism may well be applied both to Greene’s deathbed repentance and to the abuse of his implacable enemy. There was in the Elizabethan time a taste for a rather maundering morality, and for a loud-mouthed scolding style of abuse. The pamphleteers talked a great deal about themselves, and conducted wit combats, which were redolent of the bear-garden and backsword combats. La Rochefoucauld’s observation, that there are men who would rather speak evil of themselves than not speak of themselves at all, may also be kept in mind. A weak, conceited, self-indulgent man, with a genuine vein of lyric poetry and of tenderness, is perhaps as accurate a summing up as can be given of Greene. He was born in 1560 and died in 1592, worn out by a Bohemian life led in a very exuberant time. There seems to be no doubt that the end was very miserable. Greene has enjoyed an unfortunate notoriety on the strength of a passage in his last pamphlet, _The Groat’s Worth of Wit_, in which he abuses Shakespeare. Everybody has heard of the “only Shake-scene in the country,” the player adorned with the feathers of Greene himself and other real poets. Historically it is of some value as proving that Shakespeare was known and prosperous in 1592. It also helps to give the measure of Greene, that while he was affecting for the press all the agony of a deathbed repentance--partly no doubt sincere enough--and was exhorting his friends to flee destruction, he could break out, with all the venom of wounded vanity, against the man who had succeeded where he himself had failed. If we had the good fortune to know nothing of the life of Greene, he would rank as a respectable writer who had a share in a time of preparation for a far greater than himself or any of his associates. His prose stories--largely adapted from the Italian--include one, _Pandosto_, which had the honour in its turn to be adapted and made into poetic drama by Shakespeare in _The Winter’s Tale_. His undoubted work for the stage which survives was all published after his death with bad or little editing. The first printed, _Orlando Furioso_, taken from a passage in Ariosto, is hopelessly corrupt. The others are--_A Looking-Glass for London and England_; _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_; _Scottish Story of James IV._; the _Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon_; and the doubtful _George-a-Green, the Pinner of Wakefield_.[74] With Greene we come to something at once very different