COTTON, when he came to lie on the bed of death, had certain topics of reflection—of a secular sort—on which he might well look back with some measure of complacency. As a student of Antiquity he had been conspicuously successful. [Sidenote: COTTON’S DEATHBED REFLECTIONS.] He had won the respect and reverence of every man in Europe who had proved himself competent to judge of such studies. And he had not been a selfish student. He had made his own researches and collections seed plots for Posterity. If, as a Statesman, he had missed his immediate aims more frequently than he had reached them, he had none the less rendered, on some salient occasions, brilliant public service. He had shewn, incontestably, that the true greatness of England lay near his heart. One of his contemporaries presently said of him—when told of his death—‘If you could look at Sir Robert COTTON’S heart “_My Library_” would be found inscribed there;—just as Queen MARY said “_Calais_” was printed deeply on hers.’ But the character impressed on every volume of that large collection which he so loved is ‘England.’ To illustrate the history, and to enlighten the policy, of Englishmen was the object which made COTTON, from his youth, a Collector. On the other hand, when the inevitable deathbed reflections passed from things secular to things sacred,—and also from Past to Future,—there was very little room for complacency of any sort. A few years before, when a better and more famous man than COTTON lay in like circumstances, this thought came into his mind:—‘Godly men, in time of extreme afflictions, did comfort themselves with the remembrance of their former life, _in which they had glorified God_. It is not so in me. I have no comfort that way. All things in my former life have been vain,—vain,—vain.’ Those words were among Sir Robert COTTON’S own early recollections. When he was sixteen years of age some of the dying words of Philip SYDNEY were repeated in almost every manor-house of England, and at many a cottage fireside. Those particular words came under his eye, at the most impressionable period of his life. The document which has handed them down to us was preserved by his care.[17] Did the exact thought they embody, and the very words themselves, come into his mind, as they well might, when he, too, lay upon his deathbed? Be that as it may, such words in Sir Robert’s mouth would have had a special fitness. And he knew it well. Happily, he also knew where to look for comfort. He found it, just as Philip SYDNEY—in common with many thousands among the nameless Englishmen who had passed away in the interval between 1586 and 1631—had found it before him. He could say, as SYDNEY said:— ‘My Faith is frail; Hope constant never, Yet this my comfort is, for ever, God saves not man for merit.’[18]