th hearing." Piers passes
from the court to the shop of a dealer in old clothes and an usurer. He
leads a very miserable life, and we have sordid descriptions of scenes
in low life with which Chettle was better acquainted than with the loves
of AEmilius and AEliana. Princes and princesses come in again; there are
revolutions, awful dangers and marvellous deliverances. All ends
happily, and Piers and his hearers agree to meet "at theyr ploughman's
holidaye. Where what happened, if Piers Plainnes please, shall per
adventure be published." This "adventure" never took place. The
incoherent mixture of the picaresque, romantic, and Arcadian tale
resulted in such an unpalatable compound that even novel-readers of
Shakespeare's time objected to a narration of this kind, and did not
trouble Chettle with a demand for its continuation.

His reputation therefore rests mainly on his dramas. One of his most
frequent associates in writing them, and one of the most prolific and
gifted, Thomas Dekker, was also something of a novelist. He has left,
besides a great quantity of plays, a number of pamphlets written very
much in Nash's vein,[292] in which there is some excellent realism,
together with the most amusing and whimsical fancies.[293] His
biography is a mere repetition of his friend's life, and the words:
Henslowe, drama, penury, pamphlets, prison, quarrels, put together, will
give a sufficient idea of the sort of existence led by him as well as by
so many of his associates.[294] He wrote some of his plays alone, many
others with numberless collaborators, such as Chettle, Drayton, Wilson,
Ben Jonson (with whom he afterwards had a violent quarrel), Haughton,
Day, Munday, Hathaway, Middleton, Webster, Heywood, Wentworth Smith,
Massinger, Ford, Rowley, and even others, for the dramatic faculty was
then so very common that any one, so to say, was good enough to act as a
collaborator in writing plays.

He had many traits in common with Nash: the same excellent faculty of
observation, the same gaiety and _entrain_, with powers of his own to
associate it with the most exquisite tenderness and pathos; the same
love for literature and for the poets, for Chaucer, for Spenser, whose
arrival in the Elysian fields he describes in a way to tempt the pencil
of a painter: "Grave Spenser was no sooner entred into this chappell of
Apollo, but these elder fathers of the divine furie gave him a lawrer
and sung his welcome; Chaucer call'd him his son