of learning, or thy wanton lyvinge, in the on thou art inferiour to all men, in the other superiour to al beasts.  Insomuch as who seeth thy dul wit, and marketh thy froward will, may well say that he neuer saw smacke of learning in thy dooings, nor sparke of relygion in thy life.  Thou onely vauntest of thy gentry:  truely thou wast made a gentleman before thou knewest what honesty meant, and no more hast thou to boast of thy stocke, than he, who being left rich by his father, dyeth a beggar by his folly.  Nobilitie began in thine auncestors and endeth in thee, and the generositie that they gayned by vertue, thou hast blotted with vice.[62]

The popularity of “Euphues” excited much imitation, and its influence is strongly marked in the works of Robert Greene.  Born in Norfolk in 1560, Greene studied at Cambridge and received the degree of Master of Arts.  After wasting his property in Italy and Spain, he returned to London to earn his bread by the pen.  As a pamphleteer, as a poet, and especially as a dramatist, Greene achieved a considerable reputation.  But his improvident habits and a life of constant debauchery brought his career to a close, amidst poverty and remorse, at the early age of thirty-two.  He died in a drunken brawl, leaving in his works the evidence of talents and qualities which the degradation of his life had failed to destroy.

Greene’s “Arcadia” was published in 1587, and bears in its fanciful title of “Camilla’s Alarum to Slumber Euphues,” the evidence of its inspiration.  Even among pastorals the improbability of this story is surpassing.  Damocles, king of Arcadia, banished his daughter with her husband and son.  Sephestia, the daughter, arrived in a part of Arcadia entirely inhabited by shepherds.  There she becomes a shepherdess under the name of Samela, and meets her husband, Maximus, who is already tending sheep in the same neighborhood with the name of Melicertus.  Strange to say, Sephestia fails to recognize her husband, and receives his addresses as a favored lover.  Soon after, Pleusidippus, Sephestia’s son, is stolen by pirates, and adopted by the king of Thessaly, in whose court he grows up.  The fame of Sephestia’s beauty reaches her father and her son, who, ignorant of the relationship in consequence of Sephestia’s change of name, both set out to woo the celebrated shepherdess.  The repulsive scene of the same woman being the object at once of the passion of her father and her son is ended by Damocles carrying off Sephestia to his own court, where he proposes to execute Maximus as his successful rival, and Sephestia for her obstinate refusal of his addresses.  The Delphian oracle, however, interposes in time by declaring the identity of Sephestia, and the story terminates as usual in weddings and reconciliations.

The conventional shepherd’s life is well described in the “Arcadia,” and the pastoral tone is skilfully maintained.  The language, however, is confessedly euphuistic, as may be seen by the author’s comment on a speech of Samela: