```Ten in the hundred the Devil allows, ```But Combes will have twelve, he swears and vows. ```If any one asks who lies in this tomb, ```"Hoh," quoth the Devil, "'tis my John a Combe!"= He was wont to go to his native country once a year. I think I have been told that he left £200 or £300 a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. I have heard Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shadwell (who is counted the best comedian we have now) say that he had a most prodigious witt, and did admire his natural parts beyond all other dramaticall writers. He was {071}wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life; says Ben Jonson, 'I wish he had blotted out a thousand.' His comedies will remain witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles _mores hominum_: How our present writers reflect much upon particular persons and coxcombites that twenty years hence they will not be understood. Though, as Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little Latin and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been, in his younger days, a school-master in the country." * * Aubrey's MSS. was called "Minutes of Lives," and was addressed to his "worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford." A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680, accompanied it, in which Aubrey says: "'T is a task that I never thought to have undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also been much tumbled up and down in it, which hath made me so well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses, before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their own relations or societies, I might add that I come of a long-aevious race, by which means I have wiped some feathers off the wings of time for several generations, which does reach high." Imagine this as the record of a real "Shakespeare!" Could we imagine it as the record of a Milton? Let us conceive of a fellow-countryman of John Milton's, a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the author of "Paradise Lost;" "He was a goodish-looking sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secretary, or something to Cromwell, or some of his gang; had some trouble with his wife; was blind, as I have heard; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." And conceive of this, a few years after Milton's death being {072}actually all the information accessible concerning him!