The incidental verse, on the other hand, though very unequal, is of decidedly higher merit.  Sephistia’s famous song should alone suffice to save any book from oblivion, while there are other verses which are not unworthy of a place beside it.  I may instance the opening of the ‘roundelay’ sung by Menaphon, the only character strictly belonging to pastoral tradition, with its picture of approaching night: 

    When tender ewes brought home with evening Sunne
      Wend to their foldes,
      And to their holdes
    The shepheards trudge when light of day is done.

Such as it was, Menaphon appealed in no small degree to the taste of the moment.  We know how great was Greene’s reputation as an author, how publishers were ready to outbid one another for the very dregs of his wit.  Thomas Brabine was but voicing the general opinion when, in some verses prefixed to Menaphon, he wrote, condescending to an inevitable pun, but also to a less excusable mixed metaphor: 

    Be thou still Greene, whiles others glorie waine.

Of his other romances it is sufficient in this place to mention that Pandosto, which contains the pastoral loves of Dorastus and Fawnia, and supplied Shakespeare with the outlines of the Winter’s Tale, appeared the year before Menaphon, while the year after saw his Never Too Late, which is likewise of a generally pastoral character, but does not appear to have suggested or influenced any subsequent work.

The remarks that have been made concerning Greene apply in a large measure also to his fellow euphuist Thomas Lodge.  His earliest romance, Forbonius and Prisceria, published in 1584, is partly pastoral in plot, a faithful lover being driven by the opposition of his lady’s father into assuming the pastoral habit; but it is chiefly the connexion of his Rosalynde of 1590 with Shakespeare’s As You Like It that gives him a claim upon our attention. Rosalynde is not only on this account the best-known, but is also intrinsically the most interesting of his romances.  The story is too familiar to need detailing.  Its origin, as is also well known, is the Tale of Gamelyn, the story which Chaucer intended putting into the mouth either of the cook, or more probably of the yeoman, and the hero of which apparently belongs to the Robin Hood cycle.  The interest centres round the three sons of Sir John of Bordeaux, who retains his name with Lodge and is Shakespeare’s Sir Roland de Bois, and whose youngest son, Lodge’s Rosader and Shakespeare’s Orlando, is named Gamelyn, and the outlaw king, Lodge’s king of France and Shakespeare’s Duke senior[141].  The entire pastoral element, as well as the courtly scenes of the earlier portion of the novel, are Lodge’s own invention.  His shepherds, whether genuine, as Coridon and Phoebe, or assumed, as Rosalynde and Rosader, are all alike Italian Arcadians, equally polished and poetical.  Montanus, a shepherd corresponding to Shakespeare’s Silvius, is a dainty rimester, and is not only well posted in the loves of Polyphemus and Galatea, but can rail on blind boy Cupid in good French, and on his mistress too—­