Background
He lived throughout his life at his birthplace, taking an active part in the official and sporting life of the district like the "old-fashioned country squire" he admitted he was. His father had many friends in the world of letters and a good library, and encouraged his son's literary interests. Cotton's first published poem, and John Dryden's, both elegies on the young Lord Hastings, appeared together in 1649; from then until his death he was always busy writing original poems and burlesques, translating from the French, or sharing his knowledge of country pursuits in prose treatises. Of these the most famous is the section which he added to his friend Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler in 1676, though The Compleat Gamester (1674) and The Planter's Manual (1675) were also once very popular. His translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays (1685) has often been reprinted.
In his own day and for long afterwards his best-known poems were the burlesques on the first and fourth books of the Aeneid, which he called, after his French predecessor Paul Scarron, Scarronides (1664, 1665). The 1675 Burlesque upon Burlesque (based on some of Lucian's dialogues) and the long, topographical Wonders of the Peak (1681) were also reprinted during the eighteenth century.
Today his shorter poems, posthumously published in 1689, are more to modern taste, as they were to that of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb. James Russell Lowell called him "a thorough master of succulently idiomatic English, which he treated with a country-gentleman-like familiarity, as his master, Montaigne, had treated French."
Cotton was married twice: first to his cousin Isabella Hutchinson, by whom he had nine children; and second to the dowager Countess of Ardglass, who was related to Oliver Cromwell. He himself was a staunch and outspoken Royalist, the friend of William Davenant and Richard Lovelace, and panegyrist of King Charles II. He died in London on Feb. 16, 1687.