The fame of Robert Greene during his lifetime eclipsed that of his contemporaries. “He was in fact the popular author of the day. His contemporaries applauded the facility with which he turned his talents to account.” “In a night and a day,” says Nash, “would he have yearked up a pamphlet as well as in seven years, and glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit.” Even Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” according to Dryden, had no such assurance in his day, if we may judge from his own account of his literary life, which shows that he had to struggle for a subsistence, as no printer was found glad, or felt himself blest, to pay him dear for the cream, much less the very “dregs of his wit.” He told Drummond that the half of his comedies were not in print, and that he had cleared but 200 pounds by all his labor for the public theatre. It has been said by one: “In the breadth of his dramatic quality, his range over every kind of poetic excellence, Jonson was excelled by Shakespeare alone.” (p. 437, “A Short History of the English People.”) When not subsidized by the court he was driven by want to write for the London theatres; he lived in a hovel in an alley, where he took service with the notorious play broker. To such as he, reference is made by Henslow, who in his diary records “the grinding toil and the starvation wages of his hungry and drudging bondsmen,” who were struggling for the meanest necessities of life. This Titan of a giant brood of playwrights, in the days of his declension wrote mendicant epistles for bread, and, doubtless, in his extremity recalled Robert Greene, the admonisher of three brother poets “that spend their wits in making plaies.” “Base minded men, all three of you! if by my miseries ye be not warned, for unto none of you, like me, sought those burrs to cleave, those puppits, I mean that speak from our mouths those antics garnisht in our colors. Is it not strange that I, to whom they all have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be both at once of them forsaken?... O that I might intreate your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.”