INTRODUCTION. xiii 



munity of sport as the first link in the chain that bound the 

 two. Having read the book, as was merely right in a 

 cavalier and sportsman, Cotton became desirous of knowing 

 its author" He was but a young man at the time (the year 

 1630 was that of his birth), and had, as a matter of course, 

 spent some time at one of the universities, though apparently 

 without taking a degree. We have no details as to that 

 period of his life save that one account of it contains the 

 variously interpretable statement that "he improved his know- 

 ledge of the Greek and Roman classics;" as a matter of fact, 

 he can hardly be congratulated on the improvement, when it 

 resulted in burlesques such as he afterwards wrote. Yet there 

 can be no doubt that during this time he gained an accurate 

 knowledge of the French language, when we remember 

 that he became the author of a more praiseworthy production, 

 the famous translation of Montaigne's Essays ; while another 

 statement, that he also acquired a knowledge of Italian, is 

 sufficiently credible, as his poetical works contain transla- 

 tions from at least one of the countrymen of Petrarca. Jn 

 pecuniary affairs Cotton was characterised by a royal care- 

 lessness it appears to have been a family trait, for his 

 father's extravagance had heavily burdened the property 

 with lawsuits and encumbrances and so we find him, a 

 young man of twenty-six, with nothing but prospects to call 

 his~bwn and these none of the brightest, precipitating 

 himself into the estate of marriage. It was not, indeed, a 

 mesalliance, for she whom he married was Isabella, daughter 

 of Sir Thomas Hutchinson, knight; but Cotton's im- 

 prudence was treated with undeserved leniency, for his father 

 died in 1658, leaving him in possession of the family 

 estate of Beresford "in the Peak." In the neighbourhood 

 was the river Dove, a tempting stream in those days to the 

 brotherhood of the angle. It was here that Cotton followed 



