at his intention was to write things "which
being read or heard in a winters evening by a good fire, or a summers
morning in the greene fields may serve both to purge melancholy from
the minde and grosse humours from the body."[153]

Again, he was connected with the Greene and Lyly group by the pleasure
he felt in composing imaginary letters. A number of such letters had
been inserted by Lyly in his "Euphues," and had proved one of the
attractions of the book; Greene and the other novelists of the period
never missed an opportunity of making their heroes write to each other,
and they always transcribed their letters in full, a process inherited
from the romance writers of the Middle Ages. Breton, following the
example already given by some of his contemporaries, went beyond that,
and published a volume of imaginary letters from everybody to anybody on
any subject, many of them rather coarse, some good, some rather slow in
their gait and heavy in their wit.[154] The public taste was so
decidedly in favour of these compositions that this was the most
successful of Breton's enterprises. It was often reprinted; a number of
similar collections were circulated in the seventeenth century, and
their popularity had not abated when Richardson was asked, by the
publishers Osborne and Rivington, to compose one for country people. He
did so, and the only difference, and a sufficiently important one, was
that in his series the letters were connected by the thread of a story.

Greene had a rival of much higher stature in his friend Thomas Lodge.
Lodge was a little older than Greene, and survived him long, so that he
happened to be a contemporary both of Greene and of his imitators. He
rivalled Greene, but did not imitate him, being himself a direct legatee
of Lyly. The sort of life he led differed greatly from that of his
friend, but it was scarcely less characteristic of the period. Lodge was
the son of a rich London grocer who had been Lord Mayor. Born in 1557,
he had known Lyly at Oxford; had studied law; then, yielding to those
desires of seeing the dangers and beauties of the world which drove the
English youths of the period to seek preferment abroad, he closed his
books for a while, and became a corsair, visiting the Canary Isles,
Brazil, and Patagonia. He brought back, as booty from his expeditions,
romances written at sea to beguile the tedium of the passage and the
anxieties of the tempest. One was called "The Margarite of A