SPORTING IN BOTH HEMISPHERES. 



CHAPTER I. 



EARLY REMINISCENCES. 



PREMISING that I trace a direct descent by my mother's 

 side (a Beresford of Ashbourne), from that jovial angler, 

 but rather imprudent financier, Charles Cotton,* whose 

 history and cypher are so beautifully blended with that of 

 the immortal Isaac Walton, it is not surprising that I should 

 have inherited, ab an early age, some of the peculiarities of 

 my ancestor ; and when I add that the greater part of my 



* Charles Cotton, son of Charles Cotton, of Ovingden, in Sussex, and 

 where his wife, daughter of Sir John Stanhope, of Elvaston, in the county 

 of Derby, by Olive, his first wife, daughter and heir of Edward Beresford, 

 of Beresford, in Staffordshire (Mrs. Cotton was heiress to her mother, and 

 by her the estate of Beresford came to Charles Cotton), was born the 28th 

 day of April, 1630, at Ovingden, where, having received such rudiments 

 of education as qualified him for the University, he was sent to Cambridge, 

 and had for his tutor Ralph Rawson, who had been ejected from his 

 fellowship of Brazen-nose by the Parliament visitors in 1648. This 

 person he has gracefully celebrated in a translation of an ode of Johannes 

 Secundus. 



Oldys says that, in 1656, Cotton then being in his twenty-sixth year, 

 and before any patrimony had descended to him, or he had any means of 

 supporting a family, he married a distant relation, Isabella, daughter of Sir 

 Thomas Hutchinson, of Owthorp, in the county of Nottingham, Knt. 

 The difficulties that might have arisen from this imprudence were averted 

 by the death of his father in 1658, an event which put him in possession 

 of the family estate, which seems, however, to have been considerably 

 encumbered. It, indeed, excites no wonder that struggling with law-suits 



B 



