earlier instances, narrative, and following to a large
extent in the steps of Lyly and Sidney; besides a large class of curious
tracts dealing with the manners, and usually the bad side of the manners,
of the town. Of the vast miscellaneous mass of these works by single
unimportant or unknown authors it is almost impossible to give any account
here, though valuable instances will be found of them in Mr. Arber's
_English Garner_. But the works of the six most important individual
writers of them--Greene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Lodge, Breton (to whom
might be added the verse-pamphleteer, but in no sense poet, Rowlands)--are
luckily now accessible as wholes, Lodge and Rowlands having been published,
or at least privately printed for subscribers, by the Hunterian Club of
Glasgow, and the other five by the prolific industry of Dr. Grosart. The
reprints of Petheram and of Mr. Arber, with new editions of Lyly and
others, have made most of the Marprelate tracts accessible. Some notice of
these collections will not only give a fair idea of the entire
miscellaneous prose of the Elizabethan period, but will also fill a
distinct gap in most histories of it. It will not be necessary to enter
into much personal detail about their authors, for most of them have been
noticed already in other capacities, and of Breton and Rowlands very little
indeed is known. Greene and Lodge stand apart from their fellows in this
respect, that their work is, in some respects at any rate, much more like
literature and less like journalism, though by an odd and apparently
perverse chance, this difference has rather hurt than saved it in the
estimation of posterity. For the kind of literature which both wrote in
this way has gone out of fashion, and its purely literary graces are barely
sufficient to save it from the point of view of form; while the bitter
personalities of Nash, and the quaint adaptations of bygone satire to
contemporary London life in which Dekker excelled, have a certain lasting
interest of matter. On the other hand, the two companions of Marlowe have
the advantage (which they little anticipated, and would perhaps less have
relished) of surviving as illustrations of Shakespere, of the Shakescene
who, decking himself out in their feathers, has by that act rescued
_Pandosto_ and _Euphues' Golden Legacy_ from oblivion by associating them
with the immortality of _As You Like It_ and _The Winter's Tale_.

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