THE

COMPLETE ANGLER;

OR,

CONTEMPLATIVE MAN'S RECREATION.

PART SECOND.

BEING

INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO ANGLE FOR A TROUT OR GRAYLING, IN A CLEAR STREAM.

Qui mihi non credit, faciat licet ipse periclum :

Et fuerit scriptis æquior ille meis.

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 MacWilliams: 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 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