end when he most needed their succour. The close of his life points a miserable moral. Having indulged in a surfeit of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine, he was seized with a mortal illness, and, being in the last extremity of distress, he must have perished for want of bare necessaries, but for the humanity of a poor shoemaker in Dowgate, at whose house he died in September, 1592, after lingering for a month in mental and bodily pain, deserted by his boon companions, and sustained by charity. The debt he contracted to this poor man he transferred on his deathbed to his wife, whom he had not seen for six years, imploring her to discharge it by an appeal to the love of their youth!' After his death, by his own request, his corpse was crowned with bays by the shoemaker's wife.

The deaths of his three intimate friends were no less wretched, as far as anything is known of them. Nash, it is said, became a penitent; but Peele hurried himself to the grave by dissipation, and Marlowe came by a violent death under peculiarly appalling circumstances.

Greene's writings were very numerous, and, as might be expected, very unequal. A full account of them will be found in Mr. Dyce's careful and elaborate edition of his dramatic works, published in two volumes in 1831. Many of them obtained a wide and rapid popularity; and his prose writings, abounding in contemporary allusions, possess, even at the present time, considerable interest for the student curious in this kind of lore.]

LOOKING GLASS FOR LONDON AND ENGLAND.

BEAUTY SUING FOR LOVE.

BEAUTY,

EAUTY, alas! where wast thou born,
Thus to hold thyself in scorn?

Whenas Beauty kissed to woo thee,

Thou by Beauty dost undo me:

Heigh-ho! despise me not.

1594.

I and thou in sooth are one,
Fairer thou, I fairer none:

Wanton thou, and wilt thou, wanton,
Yield a cruel heart to plant on?
Do me right, and do me reason;
Cruelty is cursed treason:

L

Heigh-ho! I love, heigh-ho! I love,
Heigh-ho! and yet he eyes me not.

SAMELA.*

IKE to Diana in her summer weed,
Girt with a crimson robe of brightest dye,
Goes fair Samela;

Whiter than be the flocks that straggling feed,
When washed by Arethusa faint they lie,
Is fair Samela;

As fair Aurora in her morning grey,
Decked with the ruddy glister of her love,
Is fair Samela;

Like lovely Thetis on a calmèd day,

Whenas her brightness Neptune's fancy move,
Shines fair Samela;

Her tresses gold, her eyes like glassy streams,
Her teeth are pearl,t the breasts are ivory
Of fair Samela;

Her cheeks, like rose and lily yield forth gleams,
Her brows' bright arches framed of ebony;

Thus fair Samela

* This charming song, which, in its structure, will remind the reader of one of Tennyson's popular lyrics, is taken from Greene's poems, of which I should have gladly availed myself more extensively if the plan of this volume permitted.

This favourite image is wrought into a delicate and fantastical conceit in a song in the Fatal Contract, a play by William Heminge, the son of Heminge, the actor :

'Who notes her teeth and lips, discloses

Walls of pearl and gates of roses;

Two-leaved doors that lead the way

Through her breath to Araby,

To which, would Cupid grant that bliss,
I'd go a pilgrimage to kiss!

Passeth fair Venus in her bravest hue,
And Juno in the shew of majesty,
For she's Samela:

Pallas in wit, all three, if you will view,
For beauty, wit, and matchless dignity
Yield to Samela.

THOMAS NASH.

1564-1601.

[THOMAS NASH was born at Lowestoff, in Suffolk, and educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his degrees of A.B. and A.M. in 1585 and 1587. The date of his birth is not known, but it has been computed, from circumstances, to have been 1564, the same year in which Shakespeare was born. His London life is sufficiently indicated in the notice already given of Peele and Greene. If he did not transcend the latter in profligacy, he underwent greater vicissitudes of distress and suffering, arising in part from the impetuosity of his temperament, which committed him to the most reckless excesses, and partly from his satirical propensities, which made him many enemies. On one occasion he was imprisoned for having written a play called the Isle of Dogs, and was several times confined in gaol in London. The principal incidents in his literary career are his famous paper-war with Gabriel Harvey, conducted on both sides with savage scurrility; and his controversy with Martin Marprelate, in which he espoused the cause of the church. He obtained an unenviable notoriety by the licentiousness and fierceness of his invectives; and the tract in which he scourges his opponent, Have with you to Saffron Walden (the name of Harvey's residence), ran through no less than six editions. Notwithstanding the coarseness and violence of his controversial pamphlets, and the scoffing bitterness of his Pierce Penniless, he had the power of writing with grace and energy when he

left the region of polemics to breathe the purer air of literature. He wrote three plays: the tragedy of Dido (in conjunction with Marlowe), and two comedies, Summer's Last Will and Testament, and the Isle of Dogs, the last never printed, and now lost. Towards the close of his life he recanted his errors in a pamphlet called Christ's Tears over Jerusalem. He died about 1601.]

SUMMER'S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. 1600.

SPRING.

SPRING, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu we, to witta woo.

The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,
And we hear birds tune this merry lay,

aye

Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu we, to witta woo.

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a sunning sit,
In every street these tunes our ears do greet,
Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu we, to witta woo.
Spring, the sweet Spring.

FAL

THE DECAY OF SUMMER.

AIR summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore,
So fair a summer look for never more:

All good things vanish less than in a day,

Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay.

Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year, The earth is hell when thou leavest to appear. What, shall those flowers that decked thy garland erst, Upon thy grave be wastefully dispersed?

O trees consume your sap in sorrow's source,
Streams turn to tears your tributary course.

Go not yet hence, bright soul of the sad year,
The earth is hell when thou leavest to appear.

THE COMING OF WINTER.

AUTUMN hath all the summer's fruitful treasure;
Gone is our sport, fled is our Croydon's pleasure!
Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace :
Ah, who shall hide us from the winter's face?
Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
And here we lie, God knows, with little ease.
From winter, plague and pestilence, good lord,
deliver us!

London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn!
Trades cry, woe worth that ever they were born!
The want of term is town and city's harm;*
Close chambers we do want to keep us warm.
Long banished must we live from our friends:
This low-built house will bring us to our ends.
From winter, plague and pestilence, good lord,
deliver us!

APPROACHING DEATH.

ADIEU; farewell earth's bliss,

This world uncertain is:

Fond are life's lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys.
None from his darts can fly:

I am sick, I must die.

Lord have mercy on us!

Rich men trust not in wealth;
Gold cannot buy you health;

* This line fixes the date of the acting of the play in the Michaelmas Term of 1598, when, in consequence of the plague, Michaelmas Term was held at St. Alban's instead of in London. The date throws a light on the allusions in the song.