LIFE OF CHARLES COTTON. 225 



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 J ucrative profession : it is true, 

 that in a poem of his writing he hints that he had a smat- 

 tering 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 Beres- 

 ford, near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, and in the neighbour- 

 hood 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 



