LOVE. HAT thing is love?-for sure love is a thing; Love is a pretty, pretty thing; Love is a fire, love is a coal, Whose flame creeps in at every hole; From whence he shoots his dainty darts And ever since was called a god That Mars with Venus played even and odd. THE OLD WIVES' TALE. 1595. THE MAID'S RESOLVE. WHENAS* the rye reach to the chin, And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within, Strawberries swimming in the cream, She could not live a maid! CELANTE AT THE WELL. ENTLY dip, but not too deep, For fear you make the golden beard to weep. [A head comes up with ears of corn, and she counts them in her lap. Fair maiden, white and red, Comb me smooth, and stroke my head, And thou shalt have some cockell-bread. Gently dip, but not too deep, For fear thou make the golden beard to weep. * When. Fair maid, white and red, Comb me smooth, and stroke my head, And every sheaf a golden tree. [A head comes up full of gold, and she combs it into her lap. DAVID AND BETHSA BE. 1599. BETHSABE BATHING. HOT sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair: Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe air, and ease me; Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me, and please me: Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning, Make not my glad cause cause of mourning. Let not my beauty's fire Inflame unstayed desire, Nor pierce any bright eye That wandereth lightly. ROBERT GREENE. 1560-1592. [THE bulk of Greene's dramatic works, like those of his friend Peele, perished in the fire of London, or mouldered into dust in the closets of the theatres. Only five of his plays have come down to us, and they contain but a single song. He shows no lyrical aptitude in his dramatic works; and, being compelled to write for subsistence, he had little leisure for cultivating any form of poetry he could not accomplish with ease and facility. Assuming him to be the author of this solitary song (the play in which it appears was written in conjunction with Lodge), it is an indifferent sample of his skill. He wrote better verses (and worse), and was capable occasionally of much beauty and neatness. Some of his best short pieces will be found in England's Helicon. The song may, without much hesitation, be ascribed to Greene. It is scarcely worthy of Lodge, whose lyrics were generally of a higher and more imaginative cast. Robert Greene was a native of Norwich, where he was born, according to different accounts, in 1560 or 1550. He was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, and took his degrees of A.B. and A.M. in 1578 and 1583. In 1588 he was incorporated at Oxford. In the interval he travelled on the Continent, and is supposed to have described some of his adventures in his Groat's Worth of Wit and Never too Late. He is said to have taken orders, and there is no doubt he studied medicine; but it is certain he followed neither profession. Like Peele, he seems to have appeared occasionally on the stage, probably as an amateur in some of his own pieces. The confessions he published of his career trace a course of almost incredible depravity. Upon his return to England, he set up for a man about town, and plunged into the grossest vices of the metropolis. It was easier for a man of genius, who loved pleasure and hated restraint, to write plays and 'love pamphlets,' than to sit down to the sober labours of the pulpit or the hospital; and Greene found in this occupation easy, although uncertain, means of living, and indulging his tastes. Somewhere in the country he married a lady of good family, and as soon as she had borne him a child, and he had expended her portion, he deserted her. The reason he assigns for this piece of turpitude is, that she was so virtuous as to endeavour to seduce him from his debaucheries. He acknowledged that he acted as ill to his friends as to his wife, exhausting their good offices, and repaying them with ingratitude. The consequence was, that he sank at last into the lowest depths of penury and degradation, running up scores at alehouses, living precariously by his pen, and forsaken by all acquaintances who were able to render him any service. The only associates he retained in his dissipation were Peele, Marlowe, and Nash, and these, as profligate and unprincipled as himself, abandoned him in the end when he most needed their succour. The close of his life points a miserable moral. Having indulged in a surfeit of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine, he was seized with a mortal illness, and, being in the last extremity of distress, he must have perished for want of bare necessaries, but for the humanity of a poor shoemaker in Dowgate, at whose house he died in September, 1592, after lingering for a month in mental and bodily pain, deserted by his boon companions, and sustained by charity. The debt he contracted to this poor man he transferred on his deathbed to his wife, whom he had not seen for six years, imploring her to discharge it by an appeal to the love of their youth!' After his death, by his own request, his corpse was crowned with bays by the shoemaker's wife. The deaths of his three intimate friends were no less wretched, as far as anything is known of them. Nash, it is said, became a penitent; but Peele hurried himself to the grave by dissipation, and Marlowe came by a violent death under peculiarly appalling circumstances. Greene's writings were very numerous, and, as might be expected, very unequal. A full account of them will be found in Mr. Dyce's careful and elaborate edition of his dramatic works, published in two volumes in 1831. Many of them obtained a wide and rapid popularity; and his prose writings, abounding in contemporary allusions, possess, even at the present time, considerable interest for the student curious in this kind of lore.] LOOKING GLASS FOR LONDON AND ENGLAND. 1594. BEAUTY SUING FOR LOVE. BEAUTY, alas! where wast thou born, Thus to hold thyself in scorn? Whenas Beauty kissed to woo thee, Heigh-ho! despise me not. I and thou in sooth are one, Wanton thou, and wilt thou, wanton, Heigh-ho! I love, heigh-ho! I love, SAMELA.* LIKE to Diana in her summer weed, Whiter than be the flocks that straggling feed, As fair Aurora in her morning grey, Like lovely Thetis on a calmèd day, Whenas her brightness Neptune's fancy move, Her tresses gold, her eyes like glassy streams, Her cheeks, like rose and lily yield forth gleams, Thus fair Samela * This charming song, which, in its structure, will remind the reader of one of Tennyson's popular lyrics, is taken from Greene's poems, of which I should have gladly availed myself more extensively if the plan of this volume permitted. This favourite image is wrought into a delicate and fantastical conceit in a song in the Fatal Contract, a play by William Heminge, the son of Heminge, the actor : 'Who notes her teeth and lips, discloses Walls of pearl and gates of roses; Two-leaved doors that lead the way Through her breath to Araby, To which, would Cupid grant that bliss, |