COTTON, Sir Robert, an eminent English antiquary, descended from an ancient family, was born in 1570. In his eighteenth year he began to collect ancient records, charters, and other manuscripts. Camden, Selden, and Speed have acknowledged their obligations to him in their respective works. He was highly distinguished by Queen Elizabeth, and also by James I. who created him a baronet. He wrote many things himself; but the principal obligation which the country owes him is for his valuable library, consisting of curious manuscripts, which he was forty years in collecting, and of which a catalogue was published by Thomas Smith, entitled Catalogus Librorum rnanuscriptorum Bibliothecae Cottoniance, etc. 1696, fol. At his death in 1631 he left the property of this collection to his family, though he designed it for public use. Large accessions were made to this library by private benefactions before the death of the founder, and afterwards by purchases of his heirs, and donations of others, who added to it a great number of books, chiefly relating to the history and antiquities of our own country. At the request of Sir

John Cotton, an act of parliament was passed for preserving it after his decease, under the above denomination, for public use. It is now fixed in the British Museum. , Cotton, Charles, a burlesque poet, was descended of a good family, and lived in the reign of Charles II. and James II. His most noted piece is Scarronides, or a travesty of the first and fourth books of the Aeneid. But though, from the title, one might imagine it an imitation of Scarron’s famous travesty of the same author, yet, upon examination, it will be found to excel not only that, but every other attempt of the same kind which has hitherto been made. He also translated several of Lucian’s dialogues, in the same manner, under the title of The Scoffer Scoff’d, and wrote another poem of a more serious kind, entitled The Wonders of the Peak. The exact period of Mr Cotton’s birth or his death is nowhere recorded; but it is probable that the latter happened about the time of the revolution. Neither is it better known what were his circumstances with respect to fortune. They appear, however, to have been easy, if one may judge from the [7:7:424] turn of his writings, which is such as seems scarcely possible for any one to indulge in whose mind was not perfectly at ease. There is one anecdote told of him which seems to show that his vein of humour could not restrain itself on any consideration. It appears that in consequence of a single couplet in his Virgil Travesty, in which he has made mention of a peculiar kind of ruff worn by a grandmother of his who lived in the Peak, he lost an estate of L.400 per annum. The old lady, whose humour and testy disposition he could by no means have been a stranger to, was never able to forgive the liberty he had taken with her; and having her fortune wholly at her own disposal, although she had previously made him her sole heir, she altered her will, and gave avřay the estate to an absolute stranger.

Cotton, Nathaniel, an English physician of the eighteenth century, who long practised at St Albans, where he had the principal charge of a lunatic asylum, and where also he died in the year 1788. Like several other medical men of this country, he cultivated poetry as well as physic; and although he published observations on a particular kind of scarlet fever, yet he is better known as the author of poetical pieces, inserted in the collection published by Dodsley, and particularly by a work.in verse, entitled, Visions for the Improvement of Children, which has been several times reprinted.

Cotton des Houssayes, Jean-Baptiste, doctor and librarian of the Sorbonne, was born at Neuville-Chant-d’Oisel, near Rouen, in November 1727, and died at Paris in August 1783. He professed theology during fifteen years at Rouen, but with what success we are not informed. His works are, 1. Eloge Historique de Μ. Maillet du Eoullay, Rouen, 1770, 8vo; 2. Eloge Historique de l’Abbé de Saas, 1775, 8vo; 3. Eloge Historique de Chamousset, prefixed to the Oeuvres completes de Chamousset, 1785, 2 vols. 8vo, which Cotton edited; and, 4. Several articles relating to botany, in the Journal de Physique of 1780. He had also laboured at a work on universal literary history, to be entitled Bibliothèque Raisonnée, the plan of which may be seen in the Année Littéraire of 1780, and in the Journal des Savans of 1781.