Robert Greene expired on the third of September, 1592. When the dead genius was in his grave, Harvey gloated and leered with hellish glee, and wrote of Greene’s “most woeful and rascal estate, how the wretched fellow or, shall I say, the prince of beggars, laid all to gage fore some few shillings and was attended by lice.” This is one of Harvey’s malignant, vitriolic, discharges in his attempt to spatter the memory and deface the monument of the dead. “Achilles tortured the dead body of Hector, and, as Antonious and his wife, Fulva, tormented the lifeless corpse of Cicero, so Gabriel Harvey hath showed the same inhumanities to Greene that lies low in his grave.” The testimony of Gabriel Harvey, whose malignant attacks on the memory of Greene by monstrously exaggerated statement, is vitiated by his own statement that “he was cheated out of an action for libel against Greene by his death.” Harvey was vulgarly ostentatious, courting notoriety by the gorgeousness of his apparel; currying favor with the great, and aping Venetian gentility after his return from Italy. He was a dabbler in astrology, a prognosticator of earthquakes, and constructor of prophetic almanacs. The failure of his predictions subjected him to much bitter ridicule. His inordinate vanity is best shown by his publication of everything spoken or written in commendation of himself, by his obsequious friends and flatterers, who snickered with the public generally, as he was an object of ridicule, the butt on which to crack their jokes. In one of those fanciful studies in Elizabethan literature, which we now hold in our hand, we may read, in a work called “A Snip for an Upstart Courtier or A Quaint Dispute Between Velvet-breeches and Cloth-breeches,” that Greene has very vulgarly libeled Harvey’s ancestry; but, when we turn to Greene’s book we learn that the vulgarity consists in calling Gabriel Harvey’s father a ropemaker. Only a snob would regard any honest employment as a degradation, and furthermore, the passage does not point contumeliously and spitefully at Gabriel Harvey’s father, for the reference is very slight. “How is he (Gabriel’s father) abused?” writes Nash, “Instead of his name he is called by the craft he gets his living with.” Still the lines which so mortally offended Gabriel were suppressed by Greene. Notwithstanding this, those biographers and critics whose sole object is to blacken the poet’s memory, conceal from the reader the fact of the detachment of all reference to a rope-maker. Harvey was extremely anxious to push himself among the aristocracy in order to conceal his humble antecedents.