As Marlowe moved from the sublime passion of his _Tamburlaine_ theme to the cold reserve of his _Edward II._, Greene also, casting off the turgid eloquence of his early style, attained at the end to an art of contemplative repose and genial humanity. The critic likes to feel that in stripping away the excrescences from his art he was discovering his own soul. In treating Greene as a representative Elizabethan, one should not ignore the individuality of the man that stamps all his work with a new impress. Without being original in structure or style Greene was individual in outlook and temper. He had a keener eye for the little things than any dramatist of his time, and he had also a better sympathy for the quick flashing moods and manifestations of human character. His knowledge of the concrete realities of character is an attribute of the man himself. In depicting fairies he lacks, as did Lyly, the imagination to vitalise an unreal world in the spirit of a Shakespeare. He chooses his characters from the world around him and studies them in their native habitat. His clowns, though belonging to an ancient family, are racy of the soil of England, and are fellows with Shadow, and Launce, and Speed and Grumio. Warren and Ermsby are Englishmen of a sturdy type, and Sir Cuthbert Anderson and Lady Anderson are studied as if in their Scotch castle. But Greene did something more than present the exteriors of men as types. He studied their psychology, and knew the warring forces within the individual soul, the power of circumstance, and ambition, and love to direct the forces of character into untoward paths. He knew that logic of human nature that counts consistency untrue, and constructs motives out of the syllogisms of perversity. So he divides the part of the Capitano, in the original story upon which _James IV._ was based, into two parts, one the working intelligence, Ateukin, and the other the executioner, Jaques. So also the King of Scots is no puppet. He struggles as he falls, and his fall is reflected in his distraught mind. And in the depiction of women Greene lavishes the finest forces of his genius. Nash called him "the Homer of women," and that phrase is worth the entirety of _Strange News_ in defending Greene's fame. Sometimes he goes to his own baser experience for his comment, and then there is, as in _Orlando Furioso_ (p. 191), a touch of the awful invective delivered against prostitutes in his _Never too Late_. But Greene's later art was better than this. Scottish Ida, who wins the heart of the King of Scots from English Doll, is no courtesan. Something of the respect and love that breathes through Greene's allusions to Doll his wife is seen in his treatment of all womankind. Even Angelica in _Orlando Furioso_, unformed as are her outlines, represents that fidelity of a patient Grizzel so well exemplified in Margaret in _Friar Bacon_ and Dorothea in _James IV._ Nothing in Marlowe's Queen Isabella of _Edward II._, Zenocrate of _Tamburlaine_, Abigail of _The Jew of Malta_, can equal the sweet and simple womanliness of Greene's gallery, comprising Isabel in _Never too Late_, Bellaria and Fawnia in _Pandosto_, Sephestia in _Menaphon_, Philomela and the shepherd's wife in the _Mourning Garment_, Margaret in _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, and Ida and Dorothea in _James IV._