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 it 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, but I must bear his charges;

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 shown, 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 advanta geous 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; Walton, as also his son, had been frequent visitants to Mr. Cotton, at Beresford; who, for the accommodation of the former, no less than of himself, had erected a fishing-house on the

bank of the river, with a stone in the front thereof, containing a cypher that incorporated the initials of both their

names.

These circumstances, together with a formal adoption, by Walton, of Mr. Cotton for his son, that will be explained in its place, were doubtless the inducements with the latter to the writing of a second part of the Complete Angler, and therein to explain more fully the art of fishing either with a natural or an artificial fly, as also the various methods of making the latter. The book, as the author assures us, was written in the short space of ten days, and first came abroad, with the fifth edition of the first part, in the above year, 1676; and ever since the two parts have been considered as one book.

The second part of the Complete Angler is, apparently, an imitation of the first. It is a course of dialogues, between the author, shadowed under the name of Piscator, and a traveller, the very person distinguished in the first part by the name of Venator, and whom Walton of a hunter had made an angler:" in which, besides the instructions there given, and the beautiful scenery of a wild and romantic country therein displayed, the urbanity, courtesy, and hospitality of a well-bred country gentleman are represented to great advantage.

This book might be thought to contain a delineation of the author's character; and dispose the reader to think that he was delighted with his situation, content with his fortunes, and, in short, one of the happiest of men: but his next publication speaks a very different language; for living in a country that abounds, above all others in this kingdom, in rocks, caverns, and subterraneous passages, (objects that, to some minds, afford more delight than stately woods and fertile plains, rich enclosures and other the milder beauties of rural nature,) he seems to have been prompted by no other than a sullen curiosity to explore the * Vide part ii. chap. i.

secrets of that nether world; and surveying it rather with wonder than philosophical delight, to have given way to his disgust, in a description of the dreary and terrific scenes around and beneath him, in a poem (written, as it is said, in emulation of Hobbes's De Mirabilibus Pecci,) entitled The Wonders of the Peak. This he first published in 1681; and afterward, with a new edition of the Virgil Travestie and the Burlesque of Lucian.

The only praise of this poem is the truth of the representations therein contained; for it is a mean composition, inharmonious in the versification, and abounding in expletives. Of the spirit in which it is written, a judgment may be formed from the following lines, part of the exordium :— Durst I expostulate with Providence,

I then should ask wherein the innocence

Of my poor undesigning infancy

Could Heaven offend to such a black degree,

As for th' offence to damn me to a place
Where nature only suffers in disgrace?

and these other, equally splenetic :

Environ'd round with nature's shames and ills,

Black heaths, wild rocks, black crags, and naked hills.

So far was Mr. Cotton from thinking, with the Psalinist, "that his lot was fallen in a fair ground, or that he had a goodly heritage."

But a greater, and to the world a more beneficial employment, at this time solicited his attention. The old translation of Montaigne's Essays, by the "resolute " John Florio, as he styled himself, was become obsolete, and the world was impatient for a new one. Mr. Cotton not only understood French with a critical exactness, but was well acquainted with the almost barbarous dialect in which that book is written and the freedom of opinion, and the general notions of men and things, which the author discovers, perhaps falling in with Mr. Cotton's sentiments of human life and manners, he undertook, and, in 1685, gave to the world, in a translation of that author, in three volumes

:

8vo. one of the most valuable books in the English language; in short, a translation that, if it does not (and many think it does in some respects) transcend, is yet nothing inferior to the original. And, indeed, little less than this is to be inferred from the testimony of the noble Marquis to whom it is dedicated, who concludes a letter of his to Mr. Cotton with this elegant encomium: "Pray believe, that he who can translate such an author without doing him wrong, must not only make me glad, but proud of being his very humble servant, HALIFAX."

These are the whole of Mr. Cotton's writings, published in his life-time. Those that came abroad after his decease, were Poems on several Occasions, 8vo. 1689, a bookseller's publication, tumbled into the world without preface, apology, or even correction, that will be spoken of hereafter; and a translation from the French of the Memoirs of the Sieur de Pontis, published in 1694, by his son, Mr. Beresford Cotton, and by him dedicated to the then Duke of Ormond, as having been undertaken, and completed, at the request of the old Duke, his grace's grandfather.

It is too much to be feared, that the difficulties he laboured under, and, in short, the straitness of his circumstances, were the reasons that induced Mr. Cotton to employ himself in writing; and, in that, so much more in translation than original composition. For, first, by the way, they are greatly mistaken, who think that the businets of writing for booksellers is a new occupation; it is known that Greene, Peacham, and Howel, for a great part of their lives subsisted almost wholly by it; though perhaps Mr. Cotton is the first instance of a gentleman by descent, and the inheritor of a fair estate, being reduced by a sad necessity to write for subsistence. But, secondly, whether through misfortune, or want of economy, or both, it may be collected from numberless passages in his writings, that Mr. Cotton's circumstances were narrow, his estates encumbered with mortgages, and his income less than suffi