Introducing Colton

Reverend Charles Caleb Colton was a man of great intellect and energy. He had a prodigious appetite for knowledge and a driving need to share it. In his 52 years of life, he produced a substantial body of writing; both prose and poetry, which for elegance, grace and wit could hardly be equaled, certainly not by many present day writers. Colton was a congential gossip and across the pages of Lacon parade a motley crew whose every character flaw was examined in gross and in detail by Cotlon. Among those so favored were Diogenes, Nero, Caligula, Napoleon, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Cromwell, Gainsborough, and Reynolds. After almost 200 years, his mordant comments--on doctors, generals, lawyers, priests, politicians and other characters have a contemporary flavor and sting that provide rewards for the brighter than average reader.

"COLTON, Charles Caleb Colton (c 1780-1832) clergyman, sportsman, gambler, suicide, and author of the aphoristic Lacon (2 vol. 1820-1822)

(Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Edinburgh, W.R.Chambers, 1914)

A Preface to “Modern Antiquity” by Charles C. Colton. This book was published post-humously in 1835 by his friend of twenty years standing, Markham Sherwill.

“Mr. Colton (as I have already stated in a former page) was laboring under great pain from an old and inveterate complaint, at the time he finished the present poem. During the last four-and-twenty hours of his chequered life, he expressed to me more than once great doubt as to the probability of his recovery. I may say that he entertained a fear of death, and while apprehending that awful moment, a sudden aberration of mind called it to his relief. How strange that which he dreaded most, he courted as his only cure. We have witnessed moments when the best and most learned men resigned their powers of reflections into the hands of despair, and abandoned the idea that good even may be inculcated by an example of courage and resignation. The insufferable agony with which Mr. Colton was afflicted, seemed at once to dethrone his reason and render him the victim of derangement. Let us hope, in consideration of his respectable and extensive connections, that a pall will be drawn over those deviations which humanity is subject to. That the good which he may have done should not be evil spoken of, it is just that we should here state how invariably cautious he was of respect toward every hallowed subject, frequent in alleviating the miseries of others, even when in affliction himself, and lasting will be the benefits of his aphorisms to the studious and contemplative, and which, if carefully gleaned, must still the voices of the enemy and avenger, forcing even such to tread lightly over the ashes of his untimely grave.”

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