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 had studied; he had for his tutor Mr Ralph Rawson, once a fellow of Brazennose 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 Ashbourne 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.

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,

*The Wonders of the Peak

P

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 lawsuits, and laden with encumbrances.

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

* Oldy's Life, xii.

+ Ibid.

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 offices; and Æneas, a person of royal descent, as a clown, a commander, and a common sailor! In the other kind of burlesque, namely, where the characters are elevated, no such difficulty interposes; grant but to Don Quixote and Sancho, to Hudibras and Ralpho, the stations which Cervantes and Butler have respectively assigned them, and all their actions are consistent with their several characters.

Soon after, he engaged in a more commendable employment, a translation of the History of the Life of the Duke d'Espernon, from 1598, where D'Avila's history ends, to 1642, in twelve books, in which undertaking he was interrupted by an appointment to some place or post, which he hints at in the preface, but did not hold long; as also by a sickness that delayed the publication until 1670, when the book came out in a folio volume, with a handsome dedication to Dr Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury.

In the same year, being the fortieth of his age, and having been honoured with a captain's commission in the army, he was drawn, by some occasion of business or interest, to visit Ireland, which event he has recorded, with some particular circumstances touching the course of his life, in a burlesque poem called A Voyage to Ireland, carelessly written, but abounding in humorous description, as will appear by the following extract therefrom :

A guide I had got, who demanded great vails
For conducting me over the mountains of Wales;
Twenty good shillings, which sure very large is:
Yet that would not serve, Lut I must bear his charges;

i...

And yet, for all that, rode astride on a beast,
The worst that e'er went on three legs, I protest.
It certainly was the most ugly of jades;

His hips and his rump made a right ace of spades;
His sides were two ladders, well spur-gall'd withal;
His neck was a helve, and his head was a mall:
For his colour, my pains and your trouble I'll spare,
For the creature was wholly denuded of hair,
And, except for two things, as bare as my nail,
A tuft of a mane, and a sprig of a tail.

Now, such as the beast was, e'en such was the rider,
With a head like a nutmeg, and legs like a spider,
A voice like a cricket, a look like a rat,

The brains of a goose, and the heart of a cat.

E'en such was my guide, and his beast: let them pass,
The one for a horse, and the other an ass.

In this poem, he relates, with singular pleasantry, that, at Chester, coming out of church, he was taken notice of by the mayor of the city, for his rich garb, and particularly a gold belt that he then wore; and by him invited home to supper, and very hospitably entertained.

In the same year, and also the year after, more correctly, he published a translation of the tragedy entitled Les Horaces, i. e. The Horatii, from the French of Pierre Corneille; and, in 1674, the Fair One of Tunis, a novel, translated also from the French; as also a translation of the Commentaries of Blaise de Montluc, marshal of France, a thrasonical gascon, (as Lord Herbert has shewn, in his History of Henry VIII,) far better skilled in the arts of flight than of battle.

In 1675, Mr Cotton published two little books, — The Planter's Manual, being Instructions for cultivating all sorts of Fruit Trees, octavo; and a burlesque of sundry select dialogues of Lucian, with the title of Burlesque upon Burlesque, or the Scoffer scoffed, duodecimo, which has much the same merit as the Virgil Travestie.

Angling having been the favourite recreation of Mr Cotton for many years before this, we cannot but suppose that the publication of such a book as the Complete Angler of Mr Walton had attracted his notice, and probably excited in him a desire to become acquainted with the author; and that, setting aside other circumstances, the advantageous situation of Mr Cotton, near the finest Trout river in the kingdom, might conduce to beget a great intimacy between them. For certain it is, that before the year 1676 they were united by the closest ties of friendship;