White makes no reservation of "gossiping tradition" in the case of Robert Greene. Greene dies "on the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee," because he was jealous of William Shakespeare, and was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself as to call that "jack of all trades" an "upstart crowe, beautified with our feathers," etc. It seems that poor Robert Greene's dying words--if they were his dying words--were his ante-mortem legacy of warning and prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. But they have not been heeded. His "upstart crowe" has not only kept all his borrowed feathers, but is arrayed each passing day with somebody's richer and brighter plumage. If Robert Greene could speak from the dust, he doubtless could tell us--as Jonson and the rest might have told us in their lifetimes, if they only would--whose all this plumage really was and is. But all are dust and ashes together now--dust and ashes three centuries old--and, as Miss Bacon said, "Who loses any thing that does not find" the secret of that dust? However, not a Shakespearean stops to waste a sigh over the memory of poor Robert Greene, * who saw his bread snatched from his mouth by a scissorer of other men's brains, and who was too human to see * "Robert Greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetry or rhetoric than his fellows (Nash, Peele, and William Shakespeare), was, from his miscellaneous and discursive reading, a very useful man in his coterie." Dr. Latham speaks of his book as "A Groats Worth of Rest, purchased with a Million of Repentance," which certainly makes better sense than "a groat's worth of wit," etc., as usually written. Which is right? Greene died in 1592. {127}and hold his peace; but over the drunken grave of the Stratford pretender--who was vanquished in his cups at Bidford and Pebworth, and lay all night under the thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the last--they weep as for one cut off untimely, as Dame Quickly over the lazared and lecherous clay of Sir John Falstaff: "Nay, sure, he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur's bosom.'A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any Christom child." But let us not assume the appearance of unkindness to William Shakespeare. He lived a merry life; and, so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his own wife, poor Robert Greene, and perhaps the delinquent for malt delivered. He loved his own, but that is no wrong. And, we must not forget that, so far as the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save by his silence, the works a too flattering posterity has assigned him.