eople, all to hold the eye by their rapidly interchanging diversity;
but few of them pause to be painted in detail as individuals. Only the
women steal from the author's gift-box a few qualities not hackneyed by
other writers, and, decked in these, make rich return by bestowing upon
their master a reputation which no other part of his work could have won
for him.

Probably we have not all the plays that Greene wrote. Evidence points to
the loss of his earlier ones. Those preserved are (the order is
approximately that in which they were written)--_Alphonsus, King of
Arragon_, _A Looking-Glass for London and England_, _Orlando Furioso_,
_Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, _James the Fourth_, and
_George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield_. The authorship of the last
is not certain, and that of the second was shared with Lodge. With
regard to the dates it is hardly safe to be more definite than to allot
them to the period 1587-92. In all we see a preference for ready-made
stories. The writer rarely invents a plot, choosing instead to dramatize
the history, romance, epic or ballad of another. Where he does invent,
as in the love plot in _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, the result is
notable. Blank verse is his medium, but in all except the first prose is
freely used for the speech of the uncultured persons. Most of the verse
is quite good, modelled on the form of Marlowe's; it is commonly least
satisfactory where the imitation is most deliberate. The prose, adopted
from Lyly's 'servants' and 'pages', not from his courtly 'goddesses', is
clear and vigorous. Euphuism asserts itself occasionally in the verse,
and the affectation of scholarship, customary in that day, is
responsible for a superabundance of classical allusions in unexpected
places.

Since Greene was at first much under the influence of Marlowe it is
necessary to say something here of that dramatist's work. For a full
consideration of the essential qualities of Marlowe the reader must be
asked to wait. Perhaps he has already discovered them in the ordinary
course of his reading, for Marlowe is too widely known to need
introduction through any text-book. Briefly, _Tamburlaine_--the play
which made the greatest impression on the playwrights of its time--may
be described as a magniloquent account of the career of a
world-conqueror whose resistless triumph over kingdoms and potentates,
signalized by acts of monstrous insolence, provides excuse for outbursts
of extravagan