Charles Cotton

Charles Cotton (1630-1687) was English poet and writer, best known for translating the work of Michel de Montaigne from the French and for his contributions to The Compleat Angler. The highly influential The Compleat Gamester has been attributed to him.

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.