For he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow, father’s joy.
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.”
And the poet who wrote this—putting tenderness into poems of the affections, and a glowing color into pastoral verse, and point and delicacy into his prose—wrote also A Groates worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, and he died of a surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine.
In that ‘Groat’s worth of Wit’ (published after his death) there is a memorable line or two—being probably the first contemporary notice of Shakespeare that still has currency; and it is in the form of a gibe:—
“There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart wrapt in a players hide, supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely Shake-Scene in a countrey.”
How drolly it sounds—to hear this fine fellow, broken up with drink and all bedevilments, making his envious lunge at the great master who has perhaps worried him by theft of some of his dramatic methods or schemes, and who gives to poor Greene one of his largest titles to fame in having been the subject of his lampoon!
It gives added importance, too, to this gibe, to know that it was penned when the writer, impoverished, diseased, deserted by patrons, saw death fronting him; and it gives one’s heart a wrench to read how this debauched poet—whose work has given some of the best color to the “Winter’s Tale” of Shakespeare—writes with faltering hand, begging his “gentle” wife’s forgiveness, and that she would see that the charitable host, who has taken him in, for his last illness, shall suffer no loss—then, toying with the sheets, and “babbling o’ green fields,” he dies.