Little is known of Greene’s life; and into the little we do know, his malignant enemy, Gabriel Harvey, has attempted to inject a deadly virus. The inaccurate figurative expressions in his reputed posthumously printed works (an alleged description of his manner of life) cannot be interpreted literally, “but may be resolved in a large measure into morbid self-upbraidings like the confession made by the revival convert who sees and paints his past in its very darkest colors.” But why should the modern reader linger over the irregularities of dissolute-living authors like Greene and Poe, whose writings are exceptionally clean. Remember Robert Burns’ noble words, “What done we partly may compute but know not what resisted.” The commentators and pharisaic critics, who have written concerning Greene, are mere computists of the poet’s vices; ministers of hate, who burlesque the poet’s soul stiffening with despair, and display their ghoulish instincts “in travestying so pathetic and tragical a deathbed as Greene’s.” Students of Elizabethan literature know that Robert Greene resisted the temptation to write in the best paying vein of the age, that of ministering to the unchaste appetites of readers for ribaldries. “To his undying honor Robert Greene, equally with James Thompson, left scarcely a line, that, dying, he need have wished to blot out.” There is no record extant of his living likeness. Chettle gives this pleasant description of his personal appearance, “With him was the fifth, a man of indifferent years; of face, amiable; of body, well proportioned; his attire after the habit of scholar-like gentleman, only his hair was somewhat long, whom I supposed to be Robert Greene, Master of Arts.” Nash notices his tawny beard, “a jolly long red peake like the spire of a steeple which he cherished continually without cutting, whereat a man might hang a jewel, it was so sharp and pendant.” Harvey, who had never seen Greene, says that he wore such long hair as was only worn by thieves and cutthroats, and taunts Nash with wearing the same “unseemly superfluity.” The habit of wearing the hair long is not unusual with poets. John Milton “cherished the same superfluity” as does also Joaquin Miller.