Greene, Peele, and Marlowe lived lives of dissipation, and died in poverty.  Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl.  When Greene was on his deathbed, dying of the disease which his excesses had caused, he was haunted by the debt of ten pounds which he owed to the shoemaker who had lodged him.  He then warned his friend Peele to amend his ways; but Peele, like him, died in distress and debt, one of the last letters he wrote being an imploring letter to Burleigh asking for relief,—­“Long sickness,” said he, “having so enfeebled me as maketh bashfulness almost impudency.”  Spenser died forsaken, and in want.  Ben Jonson says of him that “he died for lack of bread in King Street, and refused twenty broad pieces sent to him by my lord of Essex,” adding, “he was sorrie he had no time to spend them.”

Of later poets and literary men, Milton died in obscurity, though not in debt.  Lovelace died in a cellar.  Butler, the author of “Hudibras,” died of starvation in Rose Alley, the same place in which Dryden was beaten by hired ruffians.  Otway was hunted by bailiffs to his last hiding-place on Tower Hill.  His last act was to beg a shilling of a gentleman, who gave him a guinea; and buying a loaf to appease his hunger, he choked at the first mouthful.  Wycherley lay seven years in gaol for debt, but lived to die in his bed at nearly eighty.  Fielding’s extravagance and dissipation in early life involved him in difficulties which he never entirely shook off, and his death was embittered by the poverty in which he left his widow and child in a foreign land.

Savage had a pension of fifty pounds a year, which he usually spent in a few days.  It was then fashionable to wear scarlet cloaks trimmed with gold lace; and Johnson one day met him, just after he had got his pension, with one of these cloaks upon his back, while, at the same time, his naked toes were sticking through his shoes.  After living a life of recklessness and dissipation, he died in prison, where he had lain six months for debt.  In concluding his “Life of Savage,” Johnson says:  “This relation will not be wholly without its use, if those who, in confidence of superior capacities or attainments, disregard the common maxims of life, shall be reminded that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.”

Sterne died poor, if he did not die insolvent.  At his death, a subscription was got up for the support of his wife and daughter.  Churchill was imprisoned for debt, occasioned by his dissoluteness and extravagance,—­Cowper characterizing him as “spendthrift alike of money and of wit.”  Chatterton, reduced to a state of starvation and despair, poisoned himself in his eighteenth year.  Sir Richard Steele was rarely out of debt.  In many respects he resembled Sheridan in temperament and character.  He was full of speculation, and was always on the point of some grand