elf was not, properly speaking, the
counterpart of the first, and had no taste for vices as vices, nor for
disorder as disorder, but was wholly and solely bent upon _enjoyment_,
immediate enjoyment whatever be the sort, the cost, or the consequence.
Hence the glaring discrepancies in Greene's life, his faults, not to say
his crimes, his sudden short-lived repentances, his supplications to his
friends not to imitate his example, his incapacity to follow steadily
one course or the other. His better self kept his writings free from
vice, but was powerless to control his conduct. This struggle between
the forces of good and evil is exceedingly well depicted in Greene's
Repentances, under his own or fictitious names; of all the heroes of his
tales he is himself the most interesting and the most deeply studied. As
a novel writer and an observer of human nature, his own portrait is
perhaps his masterpiece.

Greene was born at Norwich about 1560, and belonged to a family in easy
circumstances. He was sent to Cambridge, where he was admitted to St.
John's College on November, 1575. There, according to a propensity that
was inborn, he at once associated with noisy, unprincipled young
fellows. This propensity accompanied him through life, and led him to
constantly surround himself with a rabble of merry companions, to be
greatly liked by them, but to make few sincere friends, and to quarrel
with these very often, to drop their acquaintance, to befriend them
again, and so on to the last.

The universities at that time were not places of edification; and Lyly,
who during the same period had a personal experience of them, was
careful when, shortly afterwards, he wrote his advice for the education
of "Ephoebus" to warn fathers of the dangers of university life: "To
speak plainly of the disorder of Athens [that is, Oxford] who does not
se it and sorrow at it? Such playing at dice, such quaffing of drink,
such daliaunce with women, such dauncing, that in my opinion there is no
quaffer in Flaunders so given to tipplyng, no courtier in Italy so given
to ryot, no creature in the world so misled as a student in Athens."
Many return from the universities "little better learned, but a great
deal worse lived, then when they went, and not only unthrifts of their
money, but also banckerouts of good manners."[110]

Greene did not fail to choose his associates among people of this sort,
and with some of them he crossed over to the continent in h