upon the foundation at Eton in 1721. In 1731 he became a scholar, and in 1734 a fellow, of King's College, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. in 1735, and soon afterwards became an assistant-master at Eton. In May 1743 he was unanimously elected head-master, but found his health too weak for the place, and in 1745 took the college living of Sturminster-Marshall, Dorsetshire. In 1748 he was elected fellow of Eton College, and resigned Sturminster on being presented to the rectory of Denham, Buckinghamshire; he was also bursar of Eton. In 1765 he proceeded D.D., and was appointed chaplain to the Earl of Halifax. In 1768 he accepted the rectory of Stoke Newington. On 25 March 1772 he was unanimously elected provost of King's College, Cambridge. He was vice-chancellor of the university in 1773. In April 1780 he received a prebend in Ely, and on 9 Aug. was appointed to the deanery. He died at Bath 20 Oct. 1797.
He married Catherine, daughter of Richard Sleech, canon of Windsor, in January 1746, and had by her twelve children. His second daughter, Catherine, married Bishop Samuel Hallifax [q. v.], whose epitaph was written by Cooke. Cooke published a few sermons, and in 1732 a small (anonymous) collection of poems called ‘Musæ Juveniles,’ including a Greek tragedy upon Solomon, called Sophia Theēlatos. In one of the sermons (1750) upon the meaning of the expression in the second Epistle of St. Peter, ‘a more sure word of prophecy,’ he defends Sherlock against Conyers Middleton, and produced a little controversy. He composed an epitaph for himself in a south vestry of King's College Chapel, attributing whatever he had done to the munificence of Henry VI. One of his sons, Edward Cooke [q. v.], became secretary at war in Ireland. Another son, William Cooke, was fellow of King's College, Cambridge, professor of Greek at Cambridge from 1780 to 1792, and rector of Hempstead-with-Lessingham, Norfolk, from 1785 till his death, 3 May 1824. He published an edition of Aristotle's ‘Poetics’ in 1785, to which was appended the first translation of Gray's ‘Elegy’ into Greek verse, a performance which had many imitators at the time (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. ix. 154–5). Mathias praises Cooke's translation as equal to Bion or Moschus, and calls the author an ‘extraordinary genius’ (Pursuits of Literature, Dial. iii.); but De Quincey in ‘Coleridge and Opium Eating’ declares that ‘scores of modern schoolboys’ could do as well. In 1789 he also published ‘A Dissertation on the Revelation of St. John,’ comparing the Apocalypse to the ‘Œdipus Tyrannus’ of Sophocles and to Homer. He verified the old saying as to the result of such studies by afterwards becoming deranged (Gent. Mag. for 1798, p. 774, and 1824, ii. 183).
[Nichols's Lit. Anecd. ix. 629, 630; Harwood's Alumni Etonenses, p. 50; Le Neve's Fasti, i. 349, 357; Gent. Mag. 1797, ii. 901, 953.]
COOKE, WILLIAM (1757–1832), legal writer, second son of John Cooke, was born at Calcutta, where his father was a member of the council, in 1757, and was educated at Harrow and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1776. He was admitted a student of Lincoln's Inn on 19 Nov. 1777. He was called to the bar there in November 1782, and in 1785 published a small treatise on the ‘Bankrupt Laws.’ He soon obtained a considerable practice in chancery and bankruptcy, and in 1816 was made K.C. and bencher of his inn. In 1818 he was commissioned by Sir John Leach, V.C., to proceed to Milan for the purpose of collecting evidence concerning the conduct of Queen Caroline. He reached Milan in September of that year, and reported the result of his investigations in July 1819. The report, which was forthwith laid before the cabinet, led to the introduction of the celebrated ‘Bill of Pains and Penalties against Her Majesty.’ About this time Cooke began to be much troubled by frequent attacks of gout, and abandoned court practice. He continued, however, to practise as a chamber counsel until 1825, when he retired from the profession. He was one of the witnesses examined before the commission on chancery procedure in 1824. During the last few years of his life he resided at his house, Wrinsted or Wrensted Court, Frinsted, Kent, where he died on 14 Sept. 1832. His work on the ‘Bankrupt Laws’ passed through eight editions, and was during his life the standard authority on the subject. It has long been superseded by more modern treatises, and the successive modifications which the law of bankruptcy has undergone during the last fifty years have rendered much of it entirely obsolete. It still, however, retains a certain value for the practitioner as an eminently lucid and virtually exhaustive digest of the earlier law. The fourth edition appeared in 1797, and the eighth and last, revised by George Roots (2 vols. 8vo), in 1823. Cooke is often erroneously credited with the works of William Cook [q. v.], miscellaneous writer.
[Legal Observer, iv. 375 (a very inaccurate account, partially corrected in vii. 101); Ch. Com. Rep. App. A. No. 6; Hansard, ii. 266; Twiss's Life of Lord Eldon, ii. 401; Gent. Mag. cii. pt. ii. 286; Lincoln's Inn Reg.; Hasted's Kent, ii. 512.]
