LLFE OF' COTTON. 343 



his writing, he hints that he had a smattering of the law, which 

 he had gotten 



" More by practice, than reading ; 

 ' By sitting o' th' 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, 1 he says he had been at Roan. His father having mar- 

 ried 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, a village near the Peak in Derbyshire, and in the neigh- 

 bourhood 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, 

 communicated to the public the result of his experience, he must 

 be deemed the great improver of this elegant recreation, and a 

 benefactor to his posterity. 



There is reason to think, that, after his leaving the university, 

 he was received into his father's family : for we are told that his 

 father, being a man of bright parts, gave him themes and authors 

 whereon to exercise his judgment and learning, even to the time 

 of his entering into the state of matrimony; the first fruit of 

 which exercises was, as it seems, his " Elegy on the gallant Lord 

 Derby." 



In 1656, being then twenty-six years of age, and before any 

 patrimony had descended to him, or he had any visible means of 



1 " The Wonders of the Peak." 



