LIFE OF CHARLES COTTON. 



rate of interest, and the extortions of usurers, that so fre- 

 quently occur in his poems ? From which several particulars 

 it seems a natural and at the same time a melancholy infe- 

 rence, that he was, not to say an author, a translator, pro- 

 bably for hire, but certainly by profession. 



It is, of all employments, one of the most painful to 

 enumerate the misfortunes and sufferings of worthy and 

 deserving men, and most so of such as have been distin- 

 guished for either their natural or acquired endowments ; 

 but truth and the laws of biographic history oblige all that 

 undertake that kind of writing to relate as well the adverse 

 as the prosperous events in the lives of those v/hom they 

 mean to celebrate, else we would gladly omit to say that 

 Mr. Cotton was, during the whole of his life, involved in 

 difficulties : Lord Clarendon says of his father that he was 

 engaged in lawsuits, and had wasted his fortune ; and it 

 cannot be supposed but that his son inherited, in some 

 degree, the vexation and expense of uncertain litigation, 

 together with the paternal estate, and might finally be 

 divested of great part of it ; further, we may suppose that 

 the easiness of his nature, and a disposition to oblige others 

 amounting even to imbecility, laid him open to the arts of 

 designing men, and gave occasion to those complaints of in- 

 gratitude and neglect which we meet with in his eclogues, 

 odes, and other of his writings. 



It is true that he was never reduced by necessity to 

 alienate the family estate, nor were his distresses uniformly 

 extreme, but they were at times severely pungent. It is 

 said that the numerous pecuniary engagements into which 

 he had entered drew upon him the misfortune of personal 

 restraint ; and that during his confinement in one of the 



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