Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/93

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nearly all the composers who were the glory of the English school of the Restoration. Blow, Wise, Humfrey, and Purcell were all his pupils, and it must have been from him that they learnt the solid traditions of the Elizabethan school which form the real foundation of their peculiar merits. The notices in Pepys's diary of Cooke are numerous and amusing, but it is sometimes difficult to distinguish him from a Captain Cocke. On 16 Sept. 1662 Pepys at Whitehall ‘heard Captain Cooke's new musique … and very fine it is. But yet I could discern Captain Cooke to overdo his part at singing, which I never did before.’ On 22 Nov. 1661 there is an amusing account of a dinner at the Dolphin, where were ‘Captain Cook and his lady, a German lady, but a very great beauty … and there we had the best musique and very good songs, and were very merry, and danced, but I was most of all taken with Madam Cook and her little boy. … But after all our mirth comes a reckoning of 4l., besides 4s. of the musicians, which did trouble us, but it must be paid, and so I took leave.’ On 13 Feb. 1666–7 Pepys met Cooke at Dr. Clarke's, ‘where, among other vanities, Captain Cooke had the arrogance to say that he was fain to direct Sir W. Davenant in the breaking of his verses into such and such lengths, according as would be fit for musick, and how he used to swear at Davenant, and command him that way, when W. Davenant would be angry, and find fault with this or that note—a vain coxcomb he is, though he sings and composes so well.’

Cooke seems to have died intestate. Of his music very little remains, and that mostly in manuscript. The Music School and Christ Church collections at Oxford contain anthems and other pieces by him, and there are also a few pieces in the British Museum.

[Wood's Bodl. MS.; Harl. M.S. 1911; Chester's Registers of Westminster Abbey; Cheque Book of Chapel Royal, ed. Rimbault, pp. 125, 128, 215; Ashmole's Order of the Garter; State Papers, Charles II, Dom. Series; Pepys's Diary, ed. Braybrook; Evelyn's Diary; Baker's Chronicle, ed. 1684, p. 745; Dramatists of the Restoration, Davenant's Works, vol. iii.; Musical Times for 1881; Hawkins's and Burney's Histories of Music; Catalogues of the Music School and Christ Church Collections.]

W. B. S.

COOKE, HENRY, D.D. (1788–1868), Irish presbyterian leader, came of a family of puritan settlers in county Down from Devonshire. He was the youngest son of John Cooke, tenant farmer of Grillagh, near Maghera, county Derry, by his second wife, Jane Howie or Howe, of Scottish descent, and was born on 11 May 1788. From his mother he derived his force of character, his remarkable memory, and his powers of sarcasm. A vivid impression, retained through life, of the events of 1798 influenced his political principles. After struggling for an education in rude country schools, he matriculated at Glasgow College in November 1802. Owing to illness he did not graduate, but he completed the arts and divinity courses, not shining as a student, but taking immense pains to qualify himself as a public speaker. Fresh from Glasgow, he appeared before the Ballymena presbytery in the somewhat unclerical attire of blue coat, drab vest, white cord breeches and tops, proved his orthodoxy on trial, and was licensed to preach. His first settlement was at Duneane, near Randalstown, county Antrim, where he was ordained on 10 Nov. 1808, though only twenty years of age, as assistant to Robert Scott, with a pittance of 25l. Irish. Here his evangelical fervour met with no sympathy. On 13 Nov. 1810 he resigned the post, and became tutor in the family of Alexander Brown of Kells, near Ballymena. He speedily received a call from Donegore, county Antrim, and was installed there by Templepatrick presbytery on 22 Jan. 1811. This congregation, vacant since 1808, had chafed under an Arian ministry, and had shown its determination to return to the old paths by rejecting the candidature of Henry Montgomery [q. v.] Cooke began at Donegore a systematic course of theological study; and by leave of his presbytery he returned, soon after his marriage, to Glasgow, where he spent the winter sessions 1815–16 and 1816–17, adding chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medicine to his metaphysical studies, and taking lessons in elocution from Vandenhoff. He had been in the habit of giving medical aid to his flock. In 1817–18 he attended classes at Trinity College and the College of Surgeons, Dublin, and walked the hospitals. He was a hard student, but with his studies he combined missionary labours, which resulted in the formation of a congregation at Carlow. Shortly after his return from Dublin, Cooke was called to Killeleagh, county Down, and resigning Donegore on 6 July 1818, he was installed at Killeleagh by Dromore presbytery on 8 Sept. The lord of the manor, and the leading presbyterian at Killeleagh, was the famous Archibald Hamilton Rowan. Rowan's younger son, Captain Rowan, an elder of Killeleagh, was attached to the older theology, and secured the election of Cooke, who was allowed to be ‘by no means bigoted in his opinions.’ In fact, while at Donegore he had been ‘led to join in Arian ordinations,’ a laxity which at a later period he sincerely lamented. In 1821 the English uni-