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Cotton cannot be said to stand in the first rank either as a writer of prose or as a poet. His poetry indeed will hardly procure for him the title of poet in its highest sense; yet it is always clear, vivid, and manly. His Virgil Travestie is that which met with most success at the time, but few will regret that it has ceased to have a real life— that it is scarcely known except to the student of English literature. Its cleverness every one who has read it will admit, but it is marred by many blemishes; of his Burlesque upon Burlesque' the same may be said. His smaller pieces, however, are so pleasing in their structure, so unaffected, and so agreeable, that they will maintain their place in all collections, and be among the most read of the minor poetry of the period to which they belong. All the excellences that mark his shorter poems pervade his prose, which, however, unfortunately consists for the chief part of translations, that have lost their interest, with the exception of Montaigne's Essays,' which will probably by most Englishmen be read with more hearty relish in Cotton's translation than in the original. Probably we have no other translation in our language into which the spirit of the original is so thoroughly transfused. But Cotton and Montaigne had much resemblance, and it was carried down to their style; the easy careless mode of Montaigne sat without awkwardness on his translator. With all his excellent qualities, there is something depressing to the spirit as we think of the history of Cotton. It is involved in some obscurity, but it is plain that his life, at least during the last few years, was one of sorrow; it must have been very sorrowful, if the tradition be true that he was hunted from place to place by

importunate creditors, and at length died by his own hand in a prison. Let none speak of him harshly-who can say what the effect of such cruel poverty must have been on a mind so sensitive as his? Yet his life affords a lesson: with talents of a high order, with tastes of a pure and graceful kind, with the most generous sensibilities, we see him yielding to the prevalent follies, falling short of the promise of his early years, and sinking gradually even in his literary character. We judge him not unkindly; far be it from us: we know few so calculated to obtain the regard and sympathy of his reader-few whose character, as displayed in their writings, is more generous, kind, and manly than that of Cotton in his earlier days; and the very sensibility of his mind and the strength of his affections would be like but to increase the keenness and poignant force of the wretched circumstances which overcame him. His later writings were no doubt adapted to the ruling taste, and it may have been necessary to him to obtain as many readers as possible; but whatever may palliate, nothing can excuse the growing coarseness of his later productions-the last edition of his Virgil Travestie' contains much that is offensive to good feeling which is not to be found in the first.

Almost directly after leaving the fishing-house we come to a spot where the river, quitting the broad meadows, forces its way through the solid rock, a detached fragment of which, like a spire in shape, springs firmly from the river, which is closed in on each side by lofty hills. We shall let our old friends describe the scene. Take Cotton's account first. "Viator. What have we got

here? A rock springing up in the middle of the river!—this is one of the oddest sights that I ever saw. Piscator. Why, sir, from that pike that you see standing up there distant from the rock, this is called Pike-pool; and young Master Izaak Walton was so pleased with it as to draw it in landscape in black and white, in a blank book I have at home." We have not young Master Izaak's drawing in black and white to offer our readers, but here is a sketch that may perhaps afford some notion of what it is like. But we must not omit old Master Izaak's picture, if we cannot have the young one's. He says in a marginal note to the passage we have just quoted-" It is a rock in the fashion of a spire steeple, and almost as big. It stands in the midst of the river Dove, and not far from Mr. Cotton's house, below which place this delicate river takes a swift career betwixt many mighty rocks, much higher and bigger than St. Paul's church before it was burnt." This sentence is followed by another, in which Walton has made a strange blunder: he says-" And this Dove, being opposed by one of the highest of them, has at last forced itself a way through it; and after a mile's concealment appears again with more glory and beauty than before that opposition, running through the most pleasant valleys and most fruitful meadows that this nation can justly boast of." This is an entire mistake; the Dove is nowhere concealed, and it is not easy to tell how Walton could have so erred, unless, writing at a distance, he had confounded in his memory the Dove with the Hamps or Manifold, both of which run into it, and which, as we shall see, are concealed for more than a mile. Cotton, in his poem of the

'Wonders of the Peake,' declares that the beauty of the river is his only solace for the many discomforts of a residence in these parts :

"In this so craggy ill-contriv'd a nook
Of this our little world, this pretty brook,
Alas! is all the recompense I share,
For all the intemperances of the air,
Perpetual winter, endless solitude,
Or the society of men so rude,
That it is ten times worse."

And he says nearly the same in his Epistle to Brome.' How he enjoyed these scenes we may gather from his verses addressed to Walton, called The Retirement,' and which are perhaps the most poetical, as they are certainly the most beautiful of his verses. We may quote a stanza or

two:

"Good God! how sweet are all things here!
How beautiful the fields appear!

That man acquainted with himself dost make,
And all his Maker's wonders to intend:

With thee I here converse at will,

And would be glad to do so still,

For it is thou alone that keep'st the Soul awake.

*

Oh, my beloved nymph, fair Dove!
Princess of rivers! how I love
Upon thy flow'ry banks to lie;

And view thy silver stream,
When gilded by the summer's beam!

*