cost, to build a windmill. What, though the worlde once went hard with
me, when I was faine to carrie my playing fardle a footebacke; _tempora
mutantur_ ... it is otherwise now; for my share in playing apparell will
not be solde for two hundred pounds."

The player goes on relating his own successes, the parts he performs,
and how he had been himself for a while the playwright of his troop, but
that had been some time ago; tastes are changing and his wit is now out
of fashion: "Nay, more, I can serve to make a prettie speech, for I was
a countrie author, passing at a morall, for it was I that pende the
moral of mans wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seaven yeeres space
was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my Almanacke is out of
date:

The people make no estimation
Of morals teaching education.

"Was not this prettie for a plaine rime extempore? If ye will, ye shall
have more.

"Nay, it is enough, said Roberto, but how meane you to use mee?

"Why, sir, in making playes, said the other, for which you shall be well
paid, if you will take the paines."

Greene did so, and with no mean success. He grew more and more famous,
and, without becoming more wealthy, had the pleasure of being able to
squander at one time much larger sums of money than before: "Roberto was
now famozed for an arch-playmaking-poet; his purse, like the sea,
somtime sweld, anon like the same sea fell to a low ebb; yet seldom he
wanted, his labors were so well esteemed."

He had not yet broken all connection with his birth-place and his
family, and some of his visits were for him memorable ones. During one
of them he was seized with a sudden fit of repentance for the loose life
he had been leading in London; the better man in him made himself heard,
and he fell into such an abyss of misery and despair as to remind us of
the great conversions of the Puritan epoch. In fact, his companions,
when he again saw them, wondering at his altered countenance, called him
a Puritan. "Once I felt a feare and horrour in my conscience, and then
the terrour of Gods judgementes did manifestly teach me that my life was
bad, that by sinne I deserved damnation, and that such was the greatnes
of my sinne that I deserved no redemption. And this inward motion I
received in St. Andrews church in the cittie of Norwich, at a lecture or
sermon then preached by a godly learned man.... At this sermon the
terrour of Gods judgementes did manifestly teach me,