reply was a fair sample of the literary billingsgate of that
controversial age and deserves the oblivion into which it promptly
sank. His next publication was his "Alarum against Usurers" (1584), a
book belonging to a class of tracts popular in that day in which the
characters and customs of the underworld of London were exposed to
popular execration. The impulse to engage in this journalistic kind of
work Lodge may have owed to Robert Greene, the dramatist, with whom he
at this time became intimate, and whose popular books on cony-catching
the "Alarum," in its spirit and purpose, closely resembles. Greene
certainly furnished some of the inspiration for the dramatic attempts
that followed. Lodge's play, "The Wounds of Civil War," though not
printed till 1594, may have been acted in 1587. We know that he
collaborated with Greene in "A Looking Glass for London and England,"
produced in 1592.

_Later Work and Death._ It is not, however, as a dramatist that Lodge
is remembered, but as a writer of pastoral romance. Here the
discursive and idyllic quality of his genius, both in verse and prose,
was to find complete and unhampered expression. Of the pastoral
romances that Lodge produced during the next decade "Rosalynde" is by
far the most important. The author wrote it, he tells us, while he was
on a freebooting expedition to the Azores and the Canaries, "when
every line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion
counterchecked with a storm." The immediate success of "Rosalynde"
encouraged Lodge to continue the writing of romances. The best known
of those that followed, and one of the prettiest of his stories, is "A
Margarite [i.e. pearl] of America." This was written while Lodge was
engaged in another patriotic raid under Captain Cavendish against the
Spanish colonies of South America. The romance is in no sense
American, and owes its title solely to the fact that it was written,