COTTON, CHARLES (1630-1687), English poet, the translator of Montaigne, was born at Beresford in Staffordshire on April 28, 163o. 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. Cotton travelled in France and perhaps in Italy, and at the age of 28 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. 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 Cornpleat 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. His wife died in 167o and in he married the dowager countess of Ardglass. He was buried in St. James's church, Piccadilly, on Feb. 16, 1687. Cotton's repu tation 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 Wordsworth (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 (1685-86, 1693, 1700, etc.), has often been reprinted.
His other works include The Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie (1664 7o), a gross burlesque of the first and fourth books of the Aeneid, which ran through i5 editions; Burlesque upon Burlesque . . . being some of Lucian's Dialogues newly put into English fustian 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. See also J. Beresford, Poems of Charles Cotton, 163o-87, with introduction, notes and portrait, (1923) ; and Poems from the Works of Charles Cotton, Newly decorated by Claud Lovat Fraser. (1922).