in the first page of
the book, and is, according to appearances, still "sweet-and-twenty."

In his tales of this sort Greene was mostly describing delights with
which he was not personally acquainted, lands of which he had no
practical knowledge, princely adventures for which no historian could
vouch. He was perfectly free and unimpeded. The taste of the public was
similar to his; no Boileau was there to stop him, and he wrote
accordingly, following his fancy, not caring in the least for nature and
possibility, letting his pen go as fast as it would, and turning out "in
a night and a day" a tale like his "Menaphon." But if he did not choose
to paint from life and to describe realities in his "love pamphlets," he
did so on purpose, not because he was unable to do it. In several of his
other writings his subject was such that the work would have been
nothing if not true; and there we find a clear view of human passions,
foibles and peculiarities, which show that if the taste of the romance
readers of the time had been such as to encourage him in this line, he
would have proved no mean realistic novelist. His Repentances abound in
portraits and scenes, showing the keen eye he had for realities. His
conny-catching literature is full of exact descriptions of the sordid
life of the sharpers and low courtesans of Elizabethan London. In more
than one of these pamphlets he foreshadows, though I need not say with a
much lesser genius, the "Moll Flanders" and the "Colonel Jack" of a
later period. The resemblance is especially great in the "Life and death
of Ned Browne,"[142] in which the hero, according to the custom in
picaresque novels, of which more hereafter, himself tells his own story
in the first person. Greene is particularly bitter in his denunciations
of the professional courtesans of London, about whom he knew probably
more than any of his contemporaries. But with all the hatred he felt
towards them so long as he had pen in hand, he cannot help repeating
that, however objectionable they are in many ways, they have for
themselves this advantage, that they are extremely beautiful, so that if
their morals are exactly the same as in other countries they excel at
least in something which in itself is not contemptible. They are "a
kinde of women bearing the faces of Angels, but the hearts of devils,
able to intrap the elect if it were possible."[143] Greene had no
pretension to be one of the elect, and was only too often "int