At the end of the year 1592 Greene fell ill, and with death at hand his better nature reas serted itself. On his deathbed he wrote or com pleted his of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentence) and Repentence of Robert Greene,' which were published shortly after his death. His affecting letter to his wife, whom he now remembered; the pathetic squalor of his death scene in the shoerndker's house; his ironical request to be crowned with bays—com plete one of the romances of literary biography.
Greene is an important figure in the history of the English novel, drama and lyric. His amorous romances are in the Euphuistic style and their subject matter is Arcadian ; but Greene's vital interest in life at first hand and his humor tend to humanize the artificial man ner and to bring the content of the stories out of the pastoral glamour into a natural world. The pastoral habit of beauty is perilously near shipwreck in the passage in where the shepherd and his jealous mistress, Pesana, begin to quarrel with true rustic energy and frankness; and the same genius for realism found its opportunity in the later cconey-catch ing° pamphlets, which, though formless, prac tically have the interest of the picaresque tale. The delicacy of his feminine characters, how ever, proves Greene's sympathy with the courtly world of beauty that his realistic power helped to supplant.
Greene's dramatic work, with the exception of
His real fame rests on the lyrics in the romances. These songs, like those in the (Ar cadia,' all highly wrought, are quite without Sidney's pedantry. they are at times stately, as in °Doron's Description of Samela,' or pathetic. as in °Sephestia's Song to Her Child' or met rically ingenious, as in Menaphon's song, Some Say but they all have a certain silvery music, a tone of dignity without heaviness, which in its peculiar quality is found only in Greene. Lodge's lyrics are the only examples that can be compared with his. In the famous °Love in My Bosom Like a Beeis perhaps smoother than anything in Greene; and °Rosalind's Description' is the best example of Lodge's rich, pictorial coloring. But Lodge's art, though fuier, is less directly human than Greene, whose lyrics, like the account of his career, stir one with a sense of the actual man.
The best complete edition is that by Grosart, 'The Huth. Library' ; the best edition of the plays and poems is that by Chur ton Collins (1905). For biography and criti cism consult 'Introductions' to above and the work by T. H. Dickinson (1909).