nationalists. In 1906 he entered parliament as Liberal member for East Nottingham. He was the author of New India (1885; revised 1904–1907).
His brother, James Sutherland Cotton (1847–), was born in India on the 17th of July 1847, and was educated at Magdalen College school and Trinity College, Oxford. For many years he was editor of the Academy; he published various works on Indian subjects, and was the English editor of the revised edition of the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908).
COTTON, CHARLES (1630–1687), English poet, the translator of Montaigne, was born at Beresford in Staffordshire on the 28th of April 1630. His father, Charles Cotton, was a man of marked ability, and counted among his friends Ben Jonson, John Selden, Sir Henry Wotton and Izaak Walton. The son was apparently not sent to the university, but he had as tutor Ralph Rawson, one of the fellows ejected from Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1648. Cotton travelled in France and perhaps in Italy, and at the age of twenty-eight he succeeded to an estate greatly encumbered by lawsuits during his father’s lifetime. The rest of his life was spent chiefly in country pursuits, but from his Voyage to Ireland in Burlesque (1670) we know that he held a captain’s commission and was ordered to that country. His friendship with Izaak Walton began about 1655, and the fact of this intimacy seems a sufficient answer to the charges sometimes brought against Cotton’s character, based chiefly on his coarse burlesques of Virgil and Lucian. Walton’s initials made into a cipher with his own were placed over the door of his fishing cottage on the Dove; and to the Compleat Angler he added “Instructions how to angle for a trout or grayling in a clear stream.” He married in 1656 his cousin Isabella, who was a sister of Colonel Hutchinson. It was for his wife’s sister, Miss Stanhope Hutchinson, that he undertook the translation of Corneille’s Horace (1671). His wife died in 1670 and five years later he married the dowager countess of Ardglass; she had a jointure of £1500 a year, but it was secured from his extravagance, and at his death in 1687 he was insolvent. He was buried in St James’s church, Piccadilly, on the 16th of February 1687. Cotton’s reputation as a burlesque writer may account for the neglect with which the rest of his poems have been treated. Their excellence was not, however, overlooked by good critics. Coleridge praises the purity and unaffectedness of his style in Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth (Preface, 1815) gave a copious quotation from the “Ode to Winter.” The “Retirement” is printed by Walton in the second part of the Compleat Angler. His masterpiece in translation, the Essays of M. de Montaigne (1685–1686, 1693, 1700, &c.), has often been reprinted, and still maintains its reputation; his other works include The Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie (1664–1670), a gross burlesque of the first and fourth books of the Aeneid, which ran through fifteen editions; Burlesque upon Burlesque, . . . being some of Lucian’s Dialogues newly put into English fustian (1675); The Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks (1667), from the French of Guillaume du Vair; The History of the Life of the Duke d’Espernon (1670), from the French of G. Girard; the Commentaries (1674) of Blaise de Montluc; the Planter’s Manual (1675), a practical book on arboriculture, in which he was an expert; The Wonders of the Peake (1681); the Compleat Gamester and The Fair one of Tunis, both dated 1674, are also assigned to Cotton.
William Oldys contributed a life of Cotton to Hawkins’s edition (1760) of the Compleat Angler. His Lyrical Poems were edited by J. R. Tutin in 1903, from an unsatisfactory edition of 1689. His translation of Montaigne was edited in 1892, and in a more elaborate form in 1902, by W. C. Hazlitt, who omitted or relegated to the notes the passages in which Cotton interpolates his own matter, and supplied his omissions.
COTTON, GEORGE EDWARD LYNCH (1813–1866), English educationist and divine, was born at Chester on the 29th of October 1813. He received his education at Westminster school, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he joined the Low Church party, and was also the intimate friend of several disciples of Thomas Arnold, among whom were C. J. Vaughan and W. J. Conybeare. The influence of Arnold determined the character and course of his life. He graduated B.A. in 1836, and became an assistant-master at Rugby. Here he worked devotedly for fifteen years, inspired with Arnold’s spirit, and heartily entering into his plans and methods. He became master of the fifth form about 1840 and was singularly successful with the boys. In 1852 he accepted the appointment of headmaster at Marlborough College, then in a state of almost hopeless disorganization, and in his six years of rule raised it to a high position. In 1858 Cotton was offered the see of Calcutta, which, after much hesitation about quitting Marlborough, he accepted. For its peculiar duties and responsibilities he was remarkably fitted by the simplicity and strength of his character, by his large tolerance, and by the experience which he had gained as teacher and ruler at Rugby and Marlborough. The government of India had just been transferred from the East India Company to the crown, and questions of education were eagerly discussed. Cotton gave himself energetically to the work of establishing schools for British and Eurasian children, classes which had been hitherto much neglected. He did much also to improve the position of the chaplains, and was unwearied in missionary visitation. His sudden death was widely mourned. On the 6th of October 1866 he had consecrated a cemetery at Kushtea on the Ganges, and was crossing a plank leading from the bank to the steamer when he slipped and fell into the river. He was carried away by the current and never seen again.
A memoir of his life with selections from his journals and correspondence, edited by his widow, was published in 1871.
COTTON, JOHN (1585–1652), English and American Puritan divine, sometimes called “The Patriarch of New England,” born in Derby, England, on the 4th of December 1585. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1603 and M.A. in 1606, and became a fellow in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, then a stronghold of Puritanism, where, during the next six years, according to his friend and biographer, Rev. Samuel Whiting, he was “head lecturer and dean, and Catechist,” and “a dilligent tutor to many pupils.” In June 1612 he became vicar of the parish church of St Botolphs in Boston, Lincolnshire, where he remained for twenty-one years and was extremely popular. Becoming more and more a Puritan in spirit, he ceased, about 1615, to observe certain ceremonies prescribed by the legally authorized ritual, and in 1632 action was begun against him in the High Commission Court. He thereupon escaped, disguised, to London, lay in concealment there for several months, and, having been deeply interested from its beginning in the colonization of New England, he eluded the watch set for him at the various English ports, and in July 1633 emigrated to the colony of Massachusetts Bay, arriving at Boston early in September. On the 10th of October he was chosen “teacher” of the First Church of Boston, of which John Wilson (1588–1667) was pastor, and here he remained until his death on the 23rd of December 1652. In the newer, as in the older Boston, his popularity was almost unbounded, and his influence, both in ecclesiastical and in civil affairs, was probably greater than that of any other minister in theocratic New England. According to the contemporary historian, William Hubbard, “Whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an order of court, if of a civil, or set up as a practice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment.” His influence, too, was generally beneficent, though it was never used to further the cause of religious freedom, or of democracy, his theory of government being given in an oft-quoted passage: “Democracy, I do not conceyve that ever God did ordeyne as a fitt government eyther for church or commonwealth. . . . As for Monarchy and aristocracy they are both for them clearly approved, and directed in Scripture yet so as (God) referreth the sovereigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best form of government.” He naturally took an active part in most, if not all, of the political and theological controversies of his time, the two principal of which were those concerning Antinomianism and the expulsion of Roger Williams. In the former his position was somewhat equivocal—he first supported and then violently opposed Anne Hutchinson,—in the latter he approved Williams’s expulsion as “righteous in the eyes of God,” and subsequently in a pamphlet discussion with
