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 manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Cottoniana, 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 Euclid. 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 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 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 Tractacy, 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 L400 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 away the estate to an absolute stranger.