His father, Charles Cotton the Elder, was a friend of Ben Jonson, John Selden, Sir Henry Wotton and Izaak Walton.

Like many Royalist gentlemen after the English Civil War the rest of his life was spent chiefly in quiet country pursuits, in Cotton's case in the Peak District and North Staffordshire.

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".

[3] He was a Derbyshire man who loved the Peak District and wrote a long topographic poem describing it: his father had moved there from the south of England, to live on his wife's estates.

The friend, who will be taught fly-fishing, expresses doubt as to whether they are still in Christendom: They come at length to the sheltered valley in which stands Cotton's house and fishing hut.

Some of Cotton's advice is still useful, as when he tells his guest to fish "fine and far off"; and he argues for small and neat flies, carefully dressed, over the bushy productions of London tackle-dealers.

Cotton's dressings are made with bear hair and camel's under fur, the soft bristles from inside a black hog's ear, and from dog's tails.

Cotton replies with the touchiness of a true obsessive: "Let me tell you, here are some colours, contemptible as they seem here, that are very hard to be got; and scarce any one of them, which, if it should be lost, I should not miss and be concerned about the loss of it too, once in the year."

And he concludes his advice with a note of earthy practicality not to be found as the sport becomes more refined: a recipe for fresh trout boiled with beer and horseradish.

), has often been reprinted, and still maintains its reputation; his other works include The Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie (1664–1670), a gross burlesque of the first and fourth books of the Aeneid, which ran through fifteen editions; Burlesque upon Burlesque, ... being some of Lucian's Dialogues newly put into English fustian (1675); The Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks (1667), from the French of Guillaume du Vair; The History of the Life of the Duke d'Espernon (1670), from the French of G Girard; the Commentaries (1674) of Blaise de Montluc; the Planter's Manual (1675), a practical book on arboriculture, in which he was an expert; The Wonders of the Peake (1681); the Compleat Gamester and The Fair one of Tunis, both dated 1674, are also assigned to Cotton.

Lovely, as is the dawning East , Was this Marble's frozen Guest; As soft, and Snowy, as that Down Adorns the Blow-balls  frizled Crown; As straight and slender as the Crest, Or Antlet  of the one beam'd Beast; Pleasant as th' odorous Month  of May : As glorious, and as light as Day .

Pretty she was, and young, and wise, And in her Calling so precise, That Industry had made her prove The sucking School-Mistress  of Love : And Death, ambitious to become Her Pupil, left his Ghastly home, And, seeing how we us'd her here, The raw-bon'd Rascal  ravisht her.

Andrew Millar, the prominent 18th century London bookseller, purchased a copyright share from John Osborne in a new, fifth, edition of Cotton's The Genuine Poetical Works.

Thus, Cotton's poetry remained popular and profitable well into the eighteenth century, partly due to his clever "burlesques" of famous works from classical literature.