SOME ACCOUNT OF

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS

OF

CHARLES COTTON, ESQ.

CHARLES COTTON, Esq. was descended from an honourable family of the town and county of Southampton. His grandfather was Sir George Cotton, knight; and his grandmother, Cassandra, the heiress of a family named Mac Williams: the issue of their marriage were, a daughter named Cassandra, who died unmarried; and a son named Charles, who, settling at Ovingden in the county of Sussex, married Olive, the daughter of Sir John Stanhope of Elvaston, in the county of Derby, knight, half brother to Philip the first Earl of Chesterfield, and ancestor of the present Earl of Harrington, and by her had issue Charles, the author of the ensuing dialogues.

Of the elder Charles we learn, from unquestionable authority, that he was, even when young, a person of distinguished parts and accomplishments; for in the enumeration of those eminent persons whom Mr. Hyde, afterward the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, chose for his friends and associates, while a student of the law, we find Mr. Cotton mentioned, together with Ben Jonson, Mr. Selden, Mr. John Vaughan, afterward Lord Chief Justice, Sir Kenelm Digby, Mr. Thomas May, the translator of Lucan, and Thomas Carew, the poet. The characters of these several persons are exhibited, with the usual elegance and accuracy

of their author, in the Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, written by himself, and lately published. That of Mr. Cotton here follows:

"Charles Cotton was a gentleman born to a competent fortune; and so qualified in his person and education, that for many years he continued the greatest ornament of the town, in the esteem of those who had been best bred. His natural parts were very great, his wit flowing in all the parts of conversation: the superstructure of learning not raised to a considerable height; but having passed some years in Cambridge, and then in France, and conversing always with learned men, his expressions were ever proper and significant, and gave great lustre to his discourse upon any argument; so that he was thought by those who were not intimate with him, to have been much better acquainted with books than he was. He had all those qualities which in youth raise men to the reputation of being fine gentlemen; such a pleasantness and gaiety of humour, such a sweetness and gentleness of nature, and such a civility and delightfulness in conversation, that no man, in the court or out of it, appeared a more accomplished person: all these extraordinary qualifications being supported by as extraordinary a clearness of courage and fearlessness of spirit, of which he gave too often manifestation. Some unhappy suits in law, and waste of his fortune in those suits, made some impression on his mind; which, being improved by domestic afflictions, and those indulgences to himself which naturally attend those afflictions, rendered his age less reverenced than his youth had been, and gave his best friends cause to have wished he had not lived so long."

The younger Mr. Cotton was born on the 28th day of April, 1630; and having, as we must suppose, received such a school education as qualified him for a university, he was sent to Cambridge, where also his father studied; he had for his tutor Mr. Ralph Rawson, once a fellow of

Brazen-nose college, Oxford, but who had been ejected from his fellowship by the Parliament visitors, in 1648. This person he has gratefully celebrated in a translation of an Ode of Johannes Secundus.

What was the course of his studies, whether they tended to qualify him for either of the learned professions, or to furnish him with those endowments of general learning and polished manners which are requisite in the character of a gentleman, we know not: it is, however, certain, that in the university he improved his knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics, and became a perfect master of the French and Italian languages.

But whatever were the views of his father in placing him at Cambridge, we find not that he betook himself, in earnest, to the pursuit of any lucrative profession: it is true, that in a poem of his writing he hints that he had a smattering of the law, which he had gotten

More by practice than reading:

By sitting o' the bench while others were pleading.

But it is rather probable, that, returning from the university to his father's, he addicted himself to the lighter kinds of study, and the improvement of a talent in poetry, of which he found himself possessed, and also that he might travel abroad; for in one of his poems, he says he had been at Roan. His father having married a lady of a Derbyshire family, and she being the daughter and heiress of Edward Beresford, of Beresford and Enson in Staffordshire, and of Bentley in the county of Derby, it may be presumed, that the descent of the family seat at Beresford to her, might have been the inducement with her husband to remove with his family from their first settlement at Ovingden, to Beresford, near Ashbourn in Derbyshire, and in the neighbourhood of the Dove, a river that divides the counties of Derby and Stafford, and of which the reader will be told so much hereafter.

The Wonders of the Peak.

And here we may suppose the younger Mr. Cotton, tempted by the vicinity of a river plentifully stored with fish of the best kinds, to have chosen angling for his recreation; and looking upon it to be, what Walton rightly terms it, "an art," to have applied himself to the improvement of that branch of it, fishing with an artificial fly. To this end he made himself acquainted with the nature of aquatic insects, with the forms and colours of the several flies that are found on or near rivers, the times of their appearance and departure, and the methods of imitating them with furs, silks, feathers, and other materials in all which researches he exercised such patience, industry, and ingenuity, and succeeded so well, that having, in the following dialogues, communicated to the public the result of his experience, he must be deemed the great improver of this elegant recreation, and a benefactor to his posterity.

There is reason to think, that, after his leaving the university, he was received into his father's family; for we are told that his father, being a man of bright parts, gave him themes and authors whereon to exercise his judgment and learning, even to the time of his entering into the state of matrimony;* the first fruit of which exercises was, as it seems, his Elegy on the gallant Lord Derby ↑

In 1656, being then twenty-six years of age, and before any patrimony had descended to him, or he had any visible means of subsisting a family, he married a distant relation, Isabella, daughter of Sir Thomas Hutchinson, of Owthorp, in the county of Nottingham, knight. The distress in which this step might have involved him was averted by the death of his father, in 1658, an event that put him into possession of the family estate: but from the character of his father, as given by Lord Clarendon, it cannot be supposed but that it was struggling with law-suits, and laden with encumbrances.

The great Lord Falkland was wont to say, that he "pitied

Oldys' Life, xii.

+ Ibid.

Ibid. xiii.

unlearned gentlemen in rainy weather." Mr. Cotton might possibly entertain the same sentiment; for, in this situation, we find that his employments were,-study, for his delight and improvement, and fishing, for his recreation and health; for each of which several employments we may suppose he chose the fittest times and seasons.

In 1660 he published A Panegyric to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, a prose pamphlet, in folio, a copy of which is preserved in the library at the British Museum.

In 1663 he published the Moral Philosophy of the Stoics, translated from the French of Monsieur De Vaix, president of the Parliament of Provence, in obedience, as the Preface informs us, to a command of his father,—doubtless with a view to his improvement in the science of morality: and this, notwithstanding the book had been translated by Dr. James, the first keeper of the Bodleian library, above threescore years before.

His next publication was Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie, being the first book of Virgil's Æneis, in English burlesque, 8vo. 1664. Concerning which, and also the fourth book, translated by him, and afterward published, it may be sufficient to say, that, for degrading sublime poetry into doggrel, Scarron's example is no authority; and that, were the merit of this practice greater than many men think it, those who admire the wit, the humour, and the learning of Hudibras, cannot but be disgusted at the low buffoonery, the forced wit, and the coarseness and obscenity of the Virgil Travestie; and yet the poem has its admirers, is commended by Sir John Suckling, in his Session of the Poets, and has passed fourteen editions.

To say the truth, the absurdity of that species of the mock epic, which gives to princes the manners of the lowest of their inferiors, has never been sufficiently noticed. In the instance before us, how is the poet embarrassed, when he describes Dido as exercising regal authority, and at the same time employed in the meanest of domestic