"So am I, where I dwell, quoth the player, reputed able at my proper cost, to build a windmill. What, though the worlde once went hard with me, when I was faine to carrie my playing fardle a footebacke; tempora mutantur ... it is otherwise now; for my share in playing apparell will not be solde for two hundred pounds."
The player goes on relating his own successes, the parts he performs, and how he had been himself for a while the playwright of his troop, but that had been some time ago; tastes are changing and his wit is now out of fashion: "Nay, more, I can serve to make a prettie speech, for I was a countrie author, passing at a morall, for it was I that pende the moral of mans wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seaven yeeres space was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my Almanacke is out of date:
The people make no estimation
Of morals teaching education.
"Was not this prettie for a plaine rime extempore? If ye will, ye shall have more.
"Nay, it is enough, said Roberto, but how meane you to use mee?
"Why, sir, in making playes, said the other, for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the paines."
Greene did so, and with no mean success. He grew more and more famous, and, without becoming more wealthy, had the pleasure of being able to squander at one time much larger sums of money than before: "Roberto was now famozed for an arch-playmaking-poet; his purse, like the sea, somtime sweld, anon like the same sea fell to a low ebb; yet seldom he wanted, his labors were so well esteemed."
He had not yet broken all connection with his birth-place and his family, and some of his visits were for him memorable ones. During one of them he was seized with a sudden fit of repentance for the loose life he had been leading in London; the better man in him made himself heard, and he fell into such an abyss of misery and despair as to remind us of the great conversions of the Puritan epoch. In fact, his companions, when he again saw them, wondering at his altered countenance, called him a Puritan. "Once I felt a feare and horrour in my conscience, and then the terrour of Gods judgementes did manifestly teach me that my life was bad, that by sinne I deserved damnation, and that such was the greatnes of my sinne that I deserved no redemption. And this inward motion I received in St. Andrews church in the cittie of Norwich, at a lecture or sermon then preached by a godly learned man.... At this sermon the terrour of Gods judgementes did manifestly teach me, that my exercises were damnable, and that I should bee wipte out of the booke of life, if I did not speedily repent my loosenes of life, and reforme my misdemeanors."
In the same way, in the next century, George Fox the Quaker, John Bunyan, and many others, were to find themselves awe-stricken at the thought of God's judgment; in the same way also, and in almost the same words, the hero of a novel that was to be world-famous in the following age was to express the sudden horror he felt when remorse began to prey upon him. "No one," wrote Robinson Crusoe, in his journal, "that shall ever read this account will expect that I shall be able to describe the horrors of my soul at this terrible vision." But Greene differed from them all by the short duration of his anxieties: "This good notion lasted not long in mee, for no sooner had I met with my copesmates, but seeing me in such a solemn humour, they demaunded the cause of my sadnes ... they fell upon me in a jeasting manner, calling me Puritane and Presizian, and wished I might have a pulpit." And soon the good effect of the godly vision in St. Andrew's church wore away.
He allowed another chance of escaping his final doom to pass in the same manner. Famous as he was all over the country, witty and brilliant, with such patrons as Leicester, Essex and Arundel, to whom several of his works are dedicated, he became acquainted with "a gentlemans daughter of good account." He loved her; his suit was favoured, and he married her, about 1586. He lived with her for a year and they had a boy; but she objected to his disorderly ways of life, and he, unable to alter them, "cast her off, having spent the marriage money." She returned to Lincolnshire, he to London, and they never met again. That Greene, however, had felt within himself what it is to be a father is shown by the exquisite "lullaby" he composed shortly after for Sephestia in his "Menaphon." It is the well-known song: