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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton and pious Izaak Walton shared enthusiasms other than their common devotion to angling. Both of these seventeenth-century fishermen had some proficiency in singing, and wrote verse to be set to music. Walton, it will be recalled, “made a conversion of an old ketch, and added more to it,” for which Henry Lawes composed the melody of The Angler's Song. Charles Cotton in imitation of Walton's verse, or out of admiration for Lawes' music, wrote The Angler's Ballad, which can be sung to the tune for Walton's ketch. But Cotton's song writing was not limited to the fitting of new words to old measures. A number of his poems were set by Mr. Coleman, and one, The Picture, received the distinction of being “Set by Mr. Laws,” the composer who had provided the music not only for Walton's Angler's Song, but for Milton's Comus songs, for Shakespeare's sonnet cxvi, and for a great many other sixteenth and seventeenth century lyrics.
1 Richard Le Gallienne in his Introduction to The Compleat Angler (London, 1904), pages lxxvi and lxxvii, quotes Dr. Bethume and James Russell Lowell to support the theory that “the incongruity of the friendship [that of Walton and Cotton] is obvious.” Perhaps these editors, critics, and biographers of Cotton failed to take into account, in spite of differences in social background, age, and temperament, that few friends have had more in common: a mutual love of sport, music, and verse making.
2 Izaak Walton, The Complete Angler (1653), p. 125.
3 Printed for two voices in the first edition of Walton's Complete Angler (1653), and reprinted in various collections containing Henry Lawes' songs, such as Ayres and Dialogues (1659), Musick's Delight upon the Citheron (1666), The Musical Companion (1667), etc.
4 For a brief account of Cotton's collaboration with Coleman, see John Beresford's edition of the Poems of Charles Cotton (London, 1923), p. 408.
5 A good modern edition of the music for Milton's Masque of Comus is contained in the Comus edited by E. H. Visiak and Herbert J. Foss (Nonesuch Press, 1937).
6 A facsimile reproducton of the music for this sonnet is printed in the present author's article, “Lawes' Version of Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI,” PMLA, li, 120.
7 Lawes' various volumes of Ayres and Dialogues (published in the years 1653, 1655, and 1658, respectively) bear ample evidence of the number of lyrics which the composer set to music.
8 For an account of the condition and nature of Gamble's manuscript see the article referred to in footnote 6.
9 The copyist sometimes used four figures when but three were required, so that folio 2079 is actually folio 279.
10 There are approximately 340 pages in the volume, some of them numbered, some not numbered; folio 279 is near the end of the collection.
11 Stanza ii begins: “Is't not enough that I must go/Into another Clime,”—Poems (1689), p. 344.
12 Cal. S. P. Dom. 1655. Quoted also by Beresford, p. 23.
13 The circumstances of publication are not known. The title-page runs: “Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Charles Cotton, Esq.; London, Printed for Tho. Basset, at the George in Fleet Street; Will Hensman and Tho. Fox, in Westminster Hall, 1689.”
14 Alexander Chalmers in his Works of the English Poets, Vol. vi (1810), reprinted the text from page 9; whereas John Beresford in his Poems of Charles Cotton (1923), reprinted the text from page 344.
15 Ode. To Chloris from France, Beresford's edition, p. 197.
16 Charles J. Sembower, The Life and Poetry of Charles Cotton (1911), p. 25.
17 Beresford's edition, p. 275.
18 Fuller details concerning Lawes' methods of composition are included in the present author's work on the life of Henry Lawes, now in progress.