my knee!
When thou art olde, ther's griefe inough for thee!
The wanton smilde, father wept;
Mother cride, babie lept:
More he crowde, more we cride;
Nature could not sorowe hide.
He must goe, he must kisse
Childe and mother, babie blisse:
For he left his pretie boy,
Fathers sorowe, fathers joy."

[Illustration: ROBERT GREENE IN HIS SHROUD.

(_From Dickenson's "Greene in conceipt,"_ 1598.)]

In London he continued a favourite: "For these my vaine discourses [that
is, his love novels] I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people,
who being my continuall companions came still to my lodging, and there
would continue quaffing, corowsing, and surfeting with me all the day
long." One of his best friends has corroborated his statement, giving at
the same time a graphic description of his physical appearance: "Hee
inherited more vertues than vices," wrote Nash, "a jolly long red peake
[beard] like the spire of a steeple he cherisht continually, without
cutting, whereat a man might hang a jewell, it was so sharp and pendant
... He had his faultes ... Debt and deadly sinne, who is not subject
to?... A good fellow he was ... In a night and a day would he have yarkt
up a pamphlet as well as in seaven yeare, and glad was that printer that
might bee so blest to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit. He
made no account of winning credite by his workes ... His only care was
to have a spel in his purse to conjure up a good cuppe of wine with at
all times."[116]

The few samples that have come to us of the talk in these meetings of
Elizabethan literary men show, as might well have been supposed, that it
was not lacking in freedom. Greene himself has left an account of one of
these conversations, when he expressed, Bohemia-wise, his opinions of a
future life and, without Aucassin's extenuating plea that he was
love-mad, he exclaimed: "Hell, quoth I, what talke you of hell to me? I
know if I once come there, I shall have the company of better men than
my selfe; I shall also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and
so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse. But you
are mad folks, quoth I, for if I feared the judges of the Bench no more
than I dread the judgments of God, I would before I slept dive into one
carles bagges or other, make merrie with the shelles I found in them so
long as they would last."[117]