Very little is known with any degree of certainty concerning the personal life of Robert Greene, and very little, if anything, in regard to his family or ancestry, although much prominence is given by imaginary writers to the history of his person in the manuals of our literature. These writers attach an auto-biographical reality to their dreams of fancy. They take advantage of Greene’s unbounded sincerity and his own too candid confession in the address to the play-writers, and of his irrepressible desire to sermonize, whether in plays or pamphlets, with all the fervor of a devout Methodist having a license to exhort. The closest analogy to Greene’s position, in fact, is that of the revival preacher—as Prof. Storojenko puts it—“who, to make the picture of the present as telling as possible, sees and paints his past in its very blackest colors. This self-flagellation is strongly connected with a really attractive feature of Greene’s character; we mean his sincerity, a boundless sincerity which never allowed him to spare himself. Robert Greene was incapable of posing and pretending to be what he was not. This is why we may fearlessly believe him when he speaks of the anguish of his soul and the sincerity of his repentance. A man whose deflection from the path of virtue cost him so much moral suffering cannot, of course, be measured by the same standard as the man who acts basely, remains at peace with himself and defends his faults by all kinds of sophistry. Speaking further of his literary labors, he never dealt in personalities in exposing some of the crying nuisances of London and is perfectly silent as to the moral change in his own character, which was the fruit of his dealing with them. In a word, he conceals all that might, in his opinion, modify the sentence that he pronounces on his own life for the edification of others.” IV There is a commendative piece of writing which should be read in connection with Greene’s letter to “divers play-makers.” We refer to the preface to “Kind Hearts Dreams,” written by Henry Chettle, which was registered December 8, 1592. Chettle says, “About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry book-seller’s hands, among others, his ‘Groats Worth of Wit’ in which a letter written to diverse play-makers is offensively by one or two of them taken.” Chettle’s statement about many papers in sundry book-sellers hands may be discredited because of the poet’s urgent necessities, and the strong desire on the part of book-sellers to publish Greene’s writings. Of this we may be sure, that the letter was not placed in book-sellers hands by Greene or for him. He would not have called his friends to repentance in that way, for it would have given publicity to the defects in the lives of his friends as well as his own.