that my exercises
were damnable, and that I should bee wipte out of the booke of life, if
I did not speedily repent my loosenes of life, and reforme my
misdemeanors."

In the same way, in the next century, George Fox the Quaker, John
Bunyan, and many others, were to find themselves awe-stricken at the
thought of God's judgment; in the same way also, and in almost the same
words, the hero of a novel that was to be world-famous in the following
age was to express the sudden horror he felt when remorse began to prey
upon him. "No one," wrote Robinson Crusoe, in his journal, "that shall
ever read this account will expect that I shall be able to describe the
horrors of my soul at this terrible vision." But Greene differed from
them all by the short duration of his anxieties: "This good notion
lasted not long in mee, for no sooner had I met with my copesmates, but
seeing me in such a solemn humour, they demaunded the cause of my sadnes
... they fell upon me in a jeasting manner, calling me Puritane and
Presizian, and wished I might have a pulpit." And soon the good effect
of the godly vision in St. Andrew's church wore away.

He allowed another chance of escaping his final doom to pass in the same
manner. Famous as he was all over the country, witty and brilliant, with
such patrons as Leicester, Essex and Arundel, to whom several of his
works are dedicated, he became acquainted with "a gentlemans daughter of
good account." He loved her; his suit was favoured, and he married her,
about 1586. He lived with her for a year and they had a boy; but she
objected to his disorderly ways of life, and he, unable to alter them,
"cast her off, having spent the marriage money." She returned to
Lincolnshire, he to London, and they never met again. That Greene,
however, had felt within himself what it is to be a father is shown by
the exquisite "lullaby" he composed shortly after for Sephestia in his
"Menaphon." It is the well-known song:

"Weepe not my wanton! smile upon my knee!
When thou art olde, ther's griefe inough for thee!
Mothers wagge, pretie boy,
Fathers sorrow, fathers joy.
When thy father first did see
Such a boy by him and mee,
He was glad, I was woe.
Fortune changde made him so,
When he left his pretie boy,
Last his sorowe, first his joy.

* * * * *

Weepe not my wanton! smile upon