CHARLES

See also:

• COTTON
• COTTON (Fr. coton; from Arab. qutun)
• CHARLES COTTON (163o–1687)
• COTTON, GEORGE EDWARD LYNCH (1813–1866)
• COTTON, JOHN (1585–1652)
• COTTON, SIR ROBERT BRUCE

COTTON (163o–1687)  , English poet, the translator of Montaigne, was born at Beresford in Staffordshire on the 28th of April 1630 . His father, Charles Cotton, was a man of marked ability, and counted among his friends Ben Jonson, John Selden, Sir Henry Wotton and Izaak Walton . The son was apparently not sent to the university, but he had as tutor Ralph Rawson, one of the fellows ejected from Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1648 . Cotton travelled in France and perhaps in Italy, and at the age of twenty-eight he succeeded to an estate greatly encumbered by lawsuits during his father's lifetime . The rest of his life was spent chiefly in country pursuits, but from his Voyage to Ireland in Burlesque (167o) we know that he held a captain's commission and was ordered to that country . His friendship with Izaak Walton began about 1655, and the fact of this intimacy seems a sufficient answer to the charges sometimes brought against Cotton's character, based chiefly on his coarse burlesques of Virgil and Lucian . Walton's initials made into a cipher with his own were placed over the door of his fishing cottage on the Dove; and to the Compleat Angler he added " Instructions how to angle for a trout or grayling in a clear stream." He married in 1656 his cousin Isabella, who was a sister of Colonel Hutchinson . It was for his wife's sister, Miss Stanhope Hutchinson, that he undertook the translation of Corneille's Horace (1671) . His wife died in 167o and five years later he married the dowager countess of Ardglass; she had a jointure of £1500 a year, but it was secured from his extravagance, and at his death in 1687 he was insolvent . He was buried in St James's church, Piccadilly, on the 16th of February 1687 . Cotton's reputation as a burlesque writer may account for the neglect with which the rest of his poems have been treated . Their excellence was not, however, overlooked by good critics .

Coleridge praises the purity and unaffectedness of his style in Biographia Literaria, and Words-worth (Preface, 1815) gave a copious quotation from the " Ode to Winter." The " Retirement " is printed by Walton in the second part of the Compleat Angler . His masterpiece in translation, the Essays of M. de Montaigne (1685–1686, 1693, 1700, &c.), has often been reprinted, and still maintains its reputation; his other works include The Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie (1664–167o), a gross burlesque of the first and fourth books of the Aeneid, which ran through fifteen editions; Burlesque upon Burlesque, ... being some of Lucian's Dialogues newly put into English fustian (1675) ; The Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks (1667), from the French of Guillaume du Vair; The History of the Life of the Duke d'Espernon (167o), from the French of G . Girard; the Commentaries (1674) of Blaise de Montluc; the Planter's Manual (1675), a practical book on arboriculture, in which he was an expert; The Wonders of the Peake (1681) ; the Compleat Gamester and The Fair one of Tunis, both dated 1674, are also assigned to Cotton . William Oldys contributed a life of Cotton to Hawkins's edition (176o) of the Compleat Angler . His Lyrical Poems were edited by J . R . Tutin in 1903, from an unsatisfactory edition of 1689 . His translation of Montaigne was edited in 1892, and in a more elaborate form in 1902, by W . C . Hazlitt, who omitted or relegated to the notes the passages in which Cotton interpolates his own matter, and supplied his omissions .