ould share his conviction if
he did not reflect that "the onix is inwardly most cold, when it is
outwardly most hot." The experiment must be tried again, and the friend
returns to the charge: "Madam, I have been stung with the scorpion and
cannot be helpt or healed by none but by the scorpion."

"I see now," replies the lady to this compliment, "that hemlocke
wheresoever it bee planted, will be pestilent [and] that the serpent
with the brightest scales shroudeth the most fatall venome." Is there
anything more certain? But that does not prevent the halcyon from
hatching when the sea is calm, and the phoenix from spreading her wings
when the sunbeams shine on her nest. This is what the husband remarks,
and, guided by the onyx, the alexander, &c., after a mock trial, he
divorces his wife.

What did the people think of it? They thought "all was not golde that
glistered, ... that the Agate, bee it never so white without, yet it is
full of black strokes within."

During this time, Philomela, the wife who had been driven away, retires
to Palermo, where her knowledge of natural history allows her to observe
that the more the camomile is trodden on, the faster it grows. Scarcely
separated from her, the husband loses his confidence in the onyx and
alexander, and sets out in search of her. He does not know her place of
retreat, but, happily, among all possible routes, he chooses precisely
that leading to Palermo. He finds his wife again, and his joy is so
great that he is choked by it, and dies; a just punishment for his
confidence in Lyly's botany.[132]

In the same way as patient Grisell's story had been in the same period
transferred to the stage, this new example of feminine virtue, from the
pen of the "Homer of women," was, in later years, worked into a drama.
At that time Greene had long been dead and could not complain of the new
"shake-scene" tortures inflicted upon him by Davenport.[133]

This story, characteristic as it is of Greene's style when he means to
be euphuistic, can scarcely be taken as a fair sample of the
improbability he is able to crowd into a single novel. Most of his tales
(and in this he greatly differs from Lyly) take place we do not know
when, we do not know where, among men we have never anywhere come
across. Learned as he was, versed in the Greek, Latin, French and
Italian tongues, able to translate passages from the Italian of Ariosto,
to dress in English language the charming "Debat de Folie e