Born at Beresford, Staffordshire, England, April 28, 1630: died at Westminster, Feb., 1687. An English poet, best known as the translator of Montaigne’s “Essays” (1685). He published anonymously “Scarronides, or the First Book of Virgil Travestie” (1664: reprinted with the fourth book in 1670), a translation of Corneille’s “Horace” (1671), “A Voyage to Ireland in Burlesque,” a poem (1670), a translation of Gerard’s “Life of the Duke of Espernon” (1670) and of the “Commentaries of De Montluc, Marshal of France” (1674), a “second part” (on fly-fishing) to the fifth edition of Walton’s “Complete Angler” (1676), etc. A collection of his poems was published in 1689.

Personal

  The noblest of our youth and best of friends, Charles Cotton, Esquire.

  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 upon 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 that he had not lived so long.

  Though his pecuniary difficulties, which were doubtless largely due to his own improvidence, caused him constant anxiety, his cheerfulness was unfailing. He was loyal to his friends, and generous to the poor; he loved good company and good liquor; he was an excellent angler, a devoted husband, and a man of unaffected piety. The portrait painted by his friend Lely shows him to have been handsome in person, with an engaging, frank countenance.

General

  The most celebrated of his works is his “Virgil Travestie,” in which he so far succeeded, as to be deemed next to Butler in burlesque; but the reader, upon comparing these two authors, will find a very great disparity in their characters. He was sociable, hospitable, and generous; but as he was far from being an economist, he, in the latter part of his life, was much involved in debt, and perpetually harassed with duns, attornies, and bailiffs.

  Finally, I will refer to Cotton’s “Ode upon Winter,” an admirable composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in which he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of Fancy.

  Waller’s song, “Go, Lovely Rose,” is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if I had happened to have had by me the Poems of Cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the “Virgil Travestied,” I should have indulged myself, and I think have gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and can not conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.

  There is a careless and happy humour in this poet’s “Voyage to Ireland,” which seems to anticipate the manner of Anstey, in the “Bath Guide.” The tasteless indelicacy of his parody of the Aeneid has found but too many admirers. His imitations of Lucian betray the grossest misconception of humorous effect when he attempts to burlesque that which is ludicrous already. He was acquainted with French and Italian; and, among several works from the former language, translated The “Horace” of Corneille, and Montaigne’s “Essays.”

  Thy New Years’ Days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine—and while that turncoat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton…. How say you, reader—do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction? Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected?—Passed like a cloud—absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry—clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, you only Spa for these hypochondries.—And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters!

  The poems of Cotton have the same moral stain as Herrick’s, with not less fancy but a less Arcadian air—more of the world that is about them. The spirit of poetry was indeed on the way downward from “great Eliza’s golden time” till its reascent into the region of the pure and elevated towards the end of the last century, and a declension may even be observed, I think, from Herrick to Cotton, who came into the world about thirty-nine years later. His poetry, indeed, has more of Charles II’s time and less of the Elizabethan period in its manner and spirit than that of Waller, who was but twenty-five years his senior. Cotton writes like a man of this world, who has glimpses now and then of the other; not as if he lived utterly out of sight of it, like the dramatists characterized by C. Lamb. There are more detailed corporeal descriptions in his poetry than in any that I know, of not more than equal extent; descriptions of the youthful body more vividly real than is to be desired, and of the body in age, when it “demands the translucency of mind not to be worse than indifferent,” so full of mortality, or, what it grieves us more to contemplate than ashes and the grave, the partial perishing of the natural man while he is yet alive, that they excite an indignant disgust on behalf of our common humanity.

  As for Charles Cotton, his “Virgil Travesty” is deader than Scarron’s, and deserves to be so. The famous lines which Lamb has made known to every one in the essay on “New Year’s Day” are the best thing he did. But there are many excellent things scattered about his work, despite a strong taint of the mere coarseness and nastiness which have been spoken of. And though he was also much tainted with the hopeless indifference to prosody which distinguished all these belated cavaliers, it is noteworthy that he was one of the few Englishmen for centuries to adopt the strict French forms and write rondeaux and the like. On the whole his poetical power has been a little undervalued, while he was also dexterous in prose.

  Cotton was a man of brilliant and versatile genius. His “Ode to Winter,” a favourite poem with Wordsworth and Lamb, is a triumph of jubilant and exuberant fancy; and the fresh-coloured, fragrant stanzas entitled “The Retirement” are of rare beauty…. His prose style is always easy and perspicuous, instinct with energy and life.