Robert Greene’s romances were “a bower of delight,” a kind of writing held in high favor by all classes. Sir Thomas Overbury describes his chambermaid as reading Greene’s works over and over again. It is a pleasure to see in the elder time Greene’s writings in hands so full of household cares, since he labored to make young lives happy. Robert Greene’s works express every variation in the changing conditions of life. The poetry of his pastoral landscapes are vivid word pictures of English sylvan scenes. The western sky on amorous autumn days is mantled with sheets of burnished gold. The soft and gentle zephyr blows over castled crag and fairy glen fragrant with the breath of flowers. In the manuals of our literature great prominence is given to the fact that Greene led a dissolute, or irregular, life, as if the debauchment of the author was transmitted by his writings. There are no indecencies in his works to attest the passage of a debauchee. Like many persons born to, and nurtured by, religious parents, Greene doubtless exaggerated his own vices. He was bad, but not altogether bad. It may truly be said of him that, in regard to all that pertains to penitence and self abasement, he spares not himself, but like John Bunyan, he was given to selfupbraiding. He (Bunyan) declares that it is true that he let loose the reins on the neck of his lust; that he delighted in all transgressions against the divine law; and that he was the ring leader of the youth of Elstow in all vice. But, when those who wished him ill, accused him of licentious amours, he called God and the angels to attest his purity. No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with having ever made any improper advances to her. Blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking seem to have been Bunyan’s only transgression after all. In Robert Greene’s writings, we have the reverse of “Herrick’s shameful pleading that if his verse was impure, his life was chaste.” Unlike Herrick, Greene did not minister to the unchaste appetite of readers for tainted literature, either in his day, or in the after time. Powerless to condemn Greene’s writings, Shakspere’s votaries would desecrate his ashes.