SOURCE: Evans, Willa McClung. “Henry Lawes and Charles Cotton.” PMLA 53, no. 3 (September 1938): 724-29.

In the following excerpt, Evans shows that Lawes set to music a version of Charles Cotton's poem “The Picture.”

Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton and pious Izaak Walton shared enthusiasms other than their common devotion to angling.¹ 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,”² for which Henry Lawes composed the melody of The Angler's Song.³ 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...