His associations at that time were getting lower and lower. He was
leaving Bohemia for the mysterious haunts of robbers, sharpers, loose
women, and "conny-catchers." He had once for a mistress the sister of a
famous thief nicknamed Cutting Ball that ended his days on the gallows,
and he had a child by her, called Fortunatus, who died in 1593. He
thought it a sort of atonement to communicate to the public the
experience he derived from his life among these people, and accordingly
printed a series of books on "conny-catching," in which he unveiled all
their tricks and malpractices. The main result was that they wanted to
kill him.[118]

It was, in fact, too late to reform; all that was left for him was to
repent, an empty repentance that no deed could follow. Though scarcely
thirty his constitution was worn out. The alternations of excessive
cheer and of scanty food had ruined his health; it was soon obvious that
he could not live much longer. One day a "surfet which hee had taken
with drinking"[119] brought him home to his room, in a poor shoemaker's
house, who allowed him to stay there by charity on credit. He was not to
come out alive. His illness lasted some weeks, and as his brain power
was unimpaired he employed his time in writing the last of his
autobiographical pamphlets. Considering the extravagance of his life, in
which he had known so many successes, and the sorrows of his protracted
illness, they read very tragically indeed. He addressed himself to the
public at large, to his more intimate friends, to his wife confessing
his wrongs towards her, and asking pardon. Yet to the last, broken as he
was in body, he remained a literary man, and while confessing all round
and pardoning every one, he could not drop his literary animosities nor
forget his life-long complaint against plagiarists.

His complaint was one of which the world of letters was to hear much
more in after time, and which in fact is constantly renewed in our own
day; it is the complaint of the novelist against the dramatist, claiming
as his own incidents transferred by the playwright from readers to
spectators. As novels proper were just beginning then in England, and as
drama was also beginning to spread, Greene's protest is one of the first
on record, and thousands were to follow it. Strange to say of all the
men of whom he complains, the one he has picked out to hold up to
disdain and to scorn, and towards whom in his dying days he seems to
h