[In the following excerpt, Bush points out the literary and thematic characteristics that made Felltham's Resolves popular.]

The didactic motives of so much secular prose make it hard to distinguish the essay from kindred forms, and it is almost impossible to separate the religious essay from its congeners. Even within fairly strict limits we find such various names as Breton and Brathwait, Joseph Hall and Fuller, and Drummond and Browne, but here we may pass by these men of many books for a less prolific author. If the essays of Cornwallis partake of the ‘resolve’, Owen Felltham's Resolves, Divine, Moral, Political (1623?) often approach the pure essay.¹ Like Cornwallis and the rest, Felltham upholds wisdom and the amateur ideal of culture against mere knowledge and pedantry. He defends the practice Burton censured, quoting without naming one's authors; to do otherwise would be ‘for a Gentleman … a little pedanticall’, especially in an essay, ‘which of all writing, is the neerest to a running Discourse’. Books are Felltham's delight and recreation, not his trade. His praise of poetry has an intimate warmth which reminds us that he was a poet in his own right. (Of late years he has regained his title to a lyric long ascribed to Suckling, ‘When, Dearest, I but think on thee’.) As a devout Anglican and royalist, who could look back on Charles the First as ‘Christ the Second’, Felltham was a man of piety but not a pietist. His essay on Puritans illustrates his fundamental reverence for ‘the beauty of order’ in the Church, in society, and in the individual. Although he seeks the via media in all things—except the love of God and hatred of evil—and although the commonplaces of religion and morals are his staple article, he can, more than most didactic essayists, make virtue sound exciting and moderation adventurous. Felltham's harmony of Christianity and Stoicism is tempered and sweetened by a love of life and literature, by philosophic charity and undogmatic good sense. His moralizings on death and mutability and vainglory, as well as his Christian Stoicism, carry us forward, if not to Urn Burial, at least to Christian Morals. Thomas Randolph in his eulogy summed up the qualities of thought and style which the age increasingly admired:

I mean the stile, being pure, and strong, and round,
Not long but Pythy: being short breath'd, but sound.
Such as the grave, acute, wise Seneca sings,
That best of Tutours to the worst of Kings.
Not long and empty; lofty but not proud;
Subtile but sweet, high but without a cloud,
Well setled, full of nerves, in briefe 'tis such
That in a little hath comprized much.

But the pointed style does not exclude homeliness or metaphysical wit. ‘A bounded mirth, is a Pattent adding time and happinesse to the crazed life of Man.’ ‘When the Husband and the Wife are together, the World is contracted in a Bed.’ And with Felltham's Christian faith and pagan reason is blended a strain of the Platonism which we encounter everywhere in the period. Earthly music awakens thoughts of ‘a higher Diapason’. For Felltham as for Marvell and others the soul is ‘manacled’ by the flesh. We are not surprised to find that Vaughan often echoed him, and it was the poet in Felltham who saw ‘Eternities Ring’ and the soul as ‘a shoot of everlastingnesse’.

Note

1. The facts of Felltham's life (1602?-68) are obscure. He was the son of a man of some property in Suffolk. He visited the Low Countries probably before 1627; the literary result appeared much later. He was acquainted with the London wits and contributed poems to Long's translation of Barclay's Argenis (1625), Annalia Dubrensia (1636), Randolph's Poems (1638), and other books. Before 1641, perhaps about the time of his father's death (1632), Felltham took service with the Earl of Thomond at Great Billing, Northamptonshire, and spent the rest of his life as steward of the estate. He died in London. Some details about the enlargements of the Resolves are given in the bibliography [of the present work].