raped";
but for all his miseries his words show a scarcely less intense
admiration for his diabolical angels than Des Grieux's famous rapturous
phrase when he meets Manon on her way to the ship that is to convey her
to America: "Son linge etait sale et derange; ses mains delicates
exposees a l'injure de l'air; enfin tout ce compose charmant, _cette
figure capable de ramener l'univers a l'idolatrie_, paraissait dans un
desordre et un abattement inexprimables." "Again," writes Greene: "let
me say this much, that our curtizans ... are far superiour in
artificiall allurement to them of all the world, for, although they
have not the painting of Italie, nor the charms of France, nor the
jewelles of Spaine, yet they have in their eyes adamants that wil drawe
youth as the jet the strawe.... Their lookes ... containe modesty,
mirth, chastity, wantonness and what not."[144]

Besides the personal reminiscences with which he made up his repentance
tales and stories, Greene as an observer of human nature is seen at his
best in his curious, and at the time famous, dialogue "between velvet
breeches and cloth breeches."[145] It is in fact a disputation between
old England and new England; the England that built the strong houses
praised by Harrison, and the England that adorned itself with the
Burghley House paper work; traditional England and italianate England.
Velvet breeches is "richly daubde with gold, and poudred with pearle,"
and is "sprung from the auncient Romans, borne in Italy, the mistresse
of the worlde for chivalry." Cloth breeches is of English manufacture
and descent, and deplores the vices that have crept into "this glorious
Iland" in the wake of Italian fashions. Both plead before Greene, each
giving very graphic accounts of the behaviour of the other. Here, for
example, is a scene, assuredly from the life, at a barber's shop:

"Velvet breeches he sittes downe in the chaire wrapt in fine cloathes
... then comes [the barber] out with his fustian eloquence, and making a
low conge, saith:

[Illustration: VELVET BREECHES AND CLOTH BREECHES, 1592.]

"Sir, will you have your wor[ship's] haire cut after the Italian maner,
shorte and round, and then frounst with the curling yrons, to make it
looke like a halfe moone in a miste? or like a Spanyard, long at the
eares and curled like the two endes of an old cast periwig? or will you
be Frenchified, with a love locke downe to your shoulders, wherein you
may weare your mistres