With all his faults, there was nothing of this weakness or snobbishness in Robert Greene, who had himself sprung from the common people, though born to good condition. Robert Burton, a contemporary, writing in “The Spacious Time of the Great Elizabeth” says that idleness was the mark of the nobility, and to earn money in any kind of trade was despicable. Gabriel Harvey flung in Greene’s face the fact that he made a living by his pen. Had young Greene lived a longer life, with all its wealth of bud and bloom, we should now have in fruition a luxuriance of imagination and versatility of diction possessed by few. With longer life he would doubtless “have gained mastery of himself, when he would have gone forward on the path of moral regeneration;” for there was in the poet’s strivings, during the last few years of his life, the promise and prophecy of a glorious future. His soul enlarged, he battled for the commonweal; his heart was with the lowly and his voice was for the right when freedom’s friends were few. In his play “The Pinner of Wakefield,” first printed in 1599, Robert Greene makes a hero, and a very strenuous one, of a mere pound-keeper who proudly refuses knighthood at the hands of the king. In the sketch given by Professor J. M. Brown we read, “In the first scene of the play when Sir Nicolas Mannering appears in Wakefield with his commission from the rebel, Earl of Kendal, and demands victuals for the rebel army, the stalwart pound-keeper steps forward, makes the knight eat his words and then his seal! ‘What! are you in choler? I will give you pills to cool your stomach. Seest thou these seals? Now by my father’s soul, which was a yeoman’s when he was alive, eat them or eat my dagger’s point, proud squire!’ The Earl of Kendal and other noblemen next appear in disguise and send their horses into the Pinner’s corn to brave him. The pound-keeper approaches and after altercation strikes the Earl. Lord Bondfield says, ‘Villain, what hast thou done? Thou hast struck an Earl.’ Pinner answers, ‘Why, what care I? A poor man that is true is better than an earl if he be false’.” A yeoman boxing or cuffing the ear of an earl! This has all the breezy freshness of American democracy.