A letter written to his wife, found with this booke after his death.
The remembrance of many wrongs offered thee, and thy vnreprooued virtues, adde greater sorrow to my miserable state then I can vtter or thou conceiue. Neither is it lessened by consideration of thy absence (though shame would let me hardly beholde thy face) but exceedingly aggrauated, for that I cannot (as I ought) to thy owne selfe reconcile my selfe, that thou mightest witnesse my inward woe at this instant, that haue made thee a wofull wife for so long a time. But equal heauen hath denied that comfort, giuing at my last neede / like succour as I haue sought all my life: being in this extremitie as voide of helpe as thou hast beene of hope. Reason would, that after so long waste, I should not send thee a childe to bring thee greater charge; but consider he is the fruit of thy wombe, in whose face regard not the fathers faults so much as thy owne perfections. He is yet Greene, and may grow straight, if he be carefully tended: otherwise apt enough (I feare me) to follow his fathers folly. That I haue offended thee highly I knowe; that thou canst forget my iniuries I hardly beleeue: yet perswade I my selfe if thou saw my wretched state thou couldest not but lament it: nay, certainely I knowe thou wouldest. Al my wrongs muster themselues about me, euery euill at once plagues me. For my contempt of God, I am contemned of men: for my swearing and forswearing, no man will beleeue me: for my gluttony, I suffer hunger: for my drunkennesse, thirst: for my adulterie, vlcerous sores. Thus God hath cast me downe, that I might be humbled: and punished me for example of others sinne: and although he suffers me in this world to perish without succour, yet trust I in the world to come to finde mercie, by the merits of my Sauiour, to whome I commend this, and commit my soule.
Thy repentant husband for his disloyaltie.
Robert Greene.
Fælicem fuisse infaustum.
Finis
[V., VI.—GABRIEL HARVEY AND THOMAS NASH]
(Characters of Gabriel Harvey and accounts of his quarrel with the Marlowe group, and Nash in particular, will be found in all histories of Elizabethan literature, and also elsewhere. The war of pamphlets between Harvey and Nash was a very furious word-battle, and its two chief monuments, Pierce's Supererogation and Have with you to Saffron Walden, are as choice examples of scurrility as can easily be found. But both are very long, and as I have set my heart on giving whole pamphlets, I have preferred Harvey's Precursor and Nash's Prognostication. The former is a sort of pilot engine to Pierce's Supererogation, published first before and then with the longer piece, and for all its brevity intensely characteristic of Harvey—the incarnation of the donnishness of his time, and also of a certain side of the Elizabethan man of letters generally. The latter, though evidently composed in direct imitation of Rabelais, of whom Nash was certainly a reader, was indirectly an attack on the Harveys, one of whom, Gabriel's brother Richard, was a great astrologer.)