SOURCE: Stapleton, Laurence. “The Graces and the Muses: Felltham's Resolves.” In The Elected Circle: Studies in the Art of Prose, pp. 73-92. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, Stapleton lavishes praise on the Resolves, disagreeing with scholars who have disparaged Felltham's use of metaphors.]

Little is known of Owen Felltham; but in an age when most writers supported themselves by some other profession, many as clergymen, his lot was to become steward of an estate.¹ As a boy of perhaps twenty he had published a small book, Resolves, destined to be reprinted, with additions and changes, eleven times within a century and several times after 1800.² The book, listed in the Stationer's Register of 1623, probably came out that year. It contained a hundred short essays on questions of faith or conduct, moving to or incorporating a determination upon some course of action or behaviour—hence its title. In the second edition Felltham added another “century” of resolves; and evidently preferring them to the original set, in later editions he placed them first in order.

Perhaps a decade after the first appearance of his book, Felltham took up service with the family of the Earl of Thomond, and lived at their country seat, Great Billing, in Northamptonshire. He had some connection with literary men—he wrote an elegy for Ben Jonson as well as an answer to “Come leave the loathed stage,” and was himself saluted by the poet Thomas Randolph. Whether he knew these men in his youth, in London, or stole away from Northamptonshire for rare city recreations, we cannot say. As a steward he was persevering, honest, even self-sacrificing in his duties as rent collector and custodian of accounts. The dowager countess, to whom he dedicated the eighth enlarged edition of Resolves, testified in a law suit that he was “just and ffaithful … in all … the affaires this defend^t intrusted him w^th and shall still soe Continue her beleife till shee finds very good reason to the Contrary w^ch shee hopes shee never shall.”³ Nevertheless, he was not like other stewards. His Resolves place him as a conscious moralist, who cared for the written word.

These two commitments of his, as moralist and stylist, cannot be separated in intention, although they sometimes are in execution. Virtue, he thought, “is better by being communicated” (II. 27, p. 310)—but cannot be so without a good style. “The muse” to him stands for virtue; style is attended by “the graces.” By serving both, he invented a variation of that mutable form, the essay.⁴ The Resolves differ from most other essays of his time or of later periods by being usually led to, rounded off with, a declaration of will or faith. Thus he saw his purpose: “I may refine my speech without harm: but I will endeavour more to reform my life. It is a good grace both of oratory, or of the pen, to speak or write proper: but that is the best work, where the graces and the muses meet” (p. 311). When they did not meet for him, it was because his moral insight flagged. Then it was the muse who failed him, although he had preferred her.

Felltham is often described as a Stoic, or a Christian Stoic, but in his treatment of virtue he is more Aristotelian than Stoic and more Christian than either.⁵ True, he often brings Cicero or Seneca or Lipsius to his aid, even when writing “Of the Soul.” Like the Stoics, he makes his bow to the sway of Fate or Fortune, and advocates control of the passions. But the attitude does not represent the marrow of his belief. The proud self-sufficiency of Stoicism is not his. Where Seneca would counsel indifference to poverty, Felltham is acutely aware of its inhuman grip. “Poor men are perpetual sentinels, watching in the depth of night, against the incessant assaults of want. … If the land be russetted with a bloodless famine; are not the poor the first that sacrifice their lives to hunger?” (I. 18, p. 53). And he sympathizes not only with the physical suffering but with the mental afflictions that go with them. “Continual care checks the spirit; continual labour checks the body; and continual insultation, both.” Here is no Stoic sense of superiority to circumstance, rather a compassionate attention to the handicaps it may impose. Along with sympathy, a certain worldliness appears in his meditation on poverty: the miseries of hunger, the checks of care are harsh, but lack of esteem is “another transcendent misery” and “Poor men, though wise, are but like satins without a gloss …” (p. 54).

The end of this little discourse shows clearly two characteristic turns of Felltham's thought. Aristotle's presentation of virtue as a mean between two extremes appealed to him: poverty is worse than abundance, but he sees the defects of riches also. “He that hath too little, wants feathers to fly withal: he that hath too much, is but cumbered with too large a tail” (pp. 55-56). The Aristotelian mean accommodates itself to the via media of Anglicanism; the Christian and man of experience speak last: “Questionless, I will rather with charity help him that is miserable, as I may be; than despise him that is poor, as I would not be” (p. 57).

This statement discloses the practicality and prudence that exist alongside Felltham's moral sincerity. He is aware of a world of rivalry, and it has made him cautious. “It is an inconvenience for a man to be accounted wiser than ordinary” (I. 28, p. 83). He would not adventure too far in search of knowledge. Sir Thomas Browne enjoyed pursuing his reason to an O altitudo, but Felltham exclaims that they live most happily who know only what is necessary (I. 27, p. 81). In choosing his friends, he resolves to avoid angry men and drunkards—as if both were equal and equally frequent menaces. He observes that some associates are too extravagant in the courtesies they proffer, others niggardly, and decides, “I will so serve others, as I injure not myself; so myself, as I may help others” (II. 42, p. 326). His praise of silence follows similar guidelines. Everywhere it “is a safe safeguard: if by it I offend, I am sure I offend without a witness” (II. 8, p. 292). Therefore to save both himself and his auditors, he will so speak as to be “free from babbling garrulity,” and so be silent, as his hearers may not account him “blockishly dull” (ibid.). In company, one would be grateful for his discretion. As a reader, one cannot help thinking of the deeper value attached to silence by Carlyle or by Thoreau. At once we see Felltham's chosen circle. He is not prophet or see-er. He is always apprehensive of a potential judge of his actions, whether God or man.

Yet he is independent—and this is one of the clear impressions of him as a person that emerge from the Resolves. He disliked being indebted to anyone. Writing on the topic “Of Courtesies” he records, “I know not that I am ever sadder, than when I am forced to accept courtesies that I cannot requite” (I. 75, p. 177). This gives a sense of the man. He goes even further: “If ever I should affect injustice, it should be in this, that I might do courtesies, and receive none.” His thoughts revolve on the same theme in “Of Bounties” and “Of Reward and Service.” In the latter there is perhaps some reflection of his position as steward in a noble household, his relation to his masters and to those under him leading to the observation that service is “a condition, which is not found in any creatures of one kind, but man” (II. 7, p. 14).

Although cautious, prudent, and independent, Felltham does not give much attention to the questions of policy that Bacon anatomizes. Without doubt he owes something to Bacon, as a literary model. But the range of his observation, as well as his constitutional temper, is different. He does not live in the environment of the courtier or the man of state. He is aware of it, has seen something of it. Those few of his resolves that may be called “political” reflect it. They are seldom concerned with issues of government but rather with what was then deemed policy: human conduct in a public world. He has read his Machiavelli and occasionally quotes him without too great disapproval, as he does in his essay “Of Dissimulation.” This may be compared with Bacon's of a similar title. Bacon is forthright in seeing deception as a sign of weakness, “for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to tell truth and to do it.” But he is hard-headed in his classifying of different types of dissimulation and their use by particular kinds of men in specific situations. His sense of the disadvantages is clear and sharp, the noblest of them coming last, “that it depriveth a man of one of the most principal instruments for action, which is trust and belief.” He closes with a curt decision on strategy. “The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion, secrecy in habit, dissimulation in seasonable use, and a power to feign if there be no remedy.”

Felltham places the problem solely in the world of policy, “[which] is but circumstantial dissembling,” and finds that “as the world is, it [dissimulation] is not all condemnable” (II. 42, p. 119). But even granting its use to princes, he deplores the extent of it, which makes state policy “an irreligious riddle” (p. 120). Unlike Bacon, he never wholly sets aside the requirements of a Christian ethic. He comes to an honourable if somewhat melancholy conclusion: “If I must use it, it shall be only so, as I will neither by it, dishonour Religion, nor be a cause of hurt to my neighbour” (p. 121). Bacon's handling of this topic is more incisive and is based on a wider experience of affairs of state and of intrigue for power. Although undeceived by the ruses of ambition, he is willing to reckon with them. Felltham has encountered this world and remembers historical examples of its demands. His treatment of the question is both more literary and more meditative. He feels a deeper personal concern for the moral issue presented.

Felltham at his desk pondering his Greek or Roman history, or his Horace or Lucretius—in the earlier Resolves, he quotes Roman authors more frequently than the Bible—reveals too little of his own disposition or tastes. But it is clear that he was capable of enthusiasm. Although in essay after essay he indicates the solution of a problem as the finding of a via media, he dislikes coldness, indifference. “Moderation may become fault,” he warns. “To be but warm, when God commands us to be hot, is sinful. We belie virtue into the constant dulness of a mediocrity” (I. 45, p. 126). Again, he shows a height of feeling when he declares, “I care not for his humour, that loves to clip the wings of a lofty fame” (I. 50, p. 141). He admired distinction of lineage if reinforced by character; nobility joined with virtue was to him “How glorious” (II. 43, p. 380). And while clear in his admiration of modesty, he would not have faintheartedness. “In any good action, that must needs be bad, that hinders it: of which strain … is … a blushing shamefacedness” (I. 77, p. 210). He was not faint-hearted himself in appreciation of beauty. In an essay intended to warn against seeming attractiveness in a wicked person, he thinks in contrast of true beauty and suddenly exclaims “Beauty is the wit of nature put into the frontispiece. If there be any human thing may teach Faith reason, this is it: in other things we imagine more than we see; in this we see more than we can imagine” (II. 78, p. 364).

One other sympathetic trait that appears in the Resolves is Felltham's attitude toward women, and fairness to them. His essay on this topic is spirited and amusing. A strict examination of the sex, he says, “makes more for their honor, than most men have acknowledged” (I. 30, p. 90). He holds man to be superior, but thinks he was not so before the fall. “If place can be any privilege; we shall find [woman] built in Paradise, when man was made without it” (p. 91). He sees a value in the mind of woman and thinks she is more temperate, modest, and merciful than man. He returns to this topic in his essay “Of Marriage and Single Life” (again, how different from Bacon's), and expresses his conviction that “It is the crown of blessings, when in one woman a man findeth both a wife and a friend” (I. 85, p. 234).

The sphere of interest described by the Resolves is enlarged in the eighth edition, which was printed in 1661, and furnished the text for subsequent ones. In the preface Felltham indicates his dissatisfaction with that part of his book which was originally printed as the first century, then placed second, and was now to be drastically altered. Speaking in the third person, he notes that “being written when he was but Eighteen,” these early pieces now seem to him “to have too many young weaknesses, to be still continued to the World: though not for the Honesty; yet, in the Composure of them” (10th ed., A 3). Accordingly he rewrote and expanded more than half of the original resolves, omitted the remainder, and added twenty-seven new pieces.⁶ The resulting Second Century, as it stands in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh editions, contains a total of eighty-five rather than one hundred resolves. The new material is valuable both for the widened scope of ideas and as evidence of Felltham's deliberate practice as a writer.

Many of the added essays are on secular topics. “Of History,” “Of Memory,” “Of Civility,” and even “Of Dancing” appear for the first time. The revised essay “Of Apparel” is a good example of the less somber cast of Felltham's mind in these latter essays, of a developing vein of humour, and an equally spirited expression, often more adequately sustained. The usually orthodox author is now more willing to indulge in speculation, for example when he tells us, “As it is my belief, that Man was created mortal before he sinned; so I could incline to believe, he might have come to Garments, although he had not faln” (10th ed. II. 52, p. 263). While Felltham adheres to his old pursuit of the mean between extremes, even in the choice of clothing, there is perhaps an increased worldliness in his observation that “as the world is, a man loses not by being rather above his rank, than under it … Socrates himself, when he went to a Feast, was content to be smug'd up and essenc'd in his Pantophles …” (ibid., pp. 264-265). Years of responsibility for the management of the Thomond estates influence his welcoming “Of Business.” He pities the man that is not brought up to it. “If a man with a Syth should mow the empty Air, he sooner would be weary than he that sweats with toyl to cut the standing Corn. Business is the Salt of Life, that only gives a grateful smack to it …” (10th ed. II. 67, p. 300). We are not surprised to learn from students of the meager facts of Felltham's career that he had become moderately wealthy. A whole point of view is implicit in such a phrase as “the Plausibilities and Benignities of life” (10th ed., p. 330), which he sought to defend against untrustworthy, self-seeking men. The more constricted world of the young author of eighteen, preoccupied with his own moral resolution, also aware somewhat abstractly of practical concerns, has expanded to a more active scene.

In addition to reflecting the point of view of an older and more expansive man, both the new and the enlarged essays show some changes in manner of writing. Mr. McCrea Hazlett, who has systematically studied the revisions, emphasizes Felltham's stronger concern for public improvement and his increased desire to persuade. He thinks that this change in attitude accounts for the increased use of formal argument, citation, anecdote, and metaphor. This is a valid point; but there is also the fact that Felltham had become a more practiced and perhaps at the same time a more indulgent writer. He now exploited more obviously his recognized skill in metaphor and pointed sentences. Wider reading had increased his knowledge of and pleasure in relevant anecdote. We must balance the richer experience and greater freedom of expression in the later essays against their occasional long-windedness and their sacrifice of the tone of simplicity, the voice of an individual witness, the effective brevity of the early resolves. A direction of the meditation inward is lost by the removal or displacement of the personal resolution that had been the culmination of the early essays. But in cases where the first version offered only a string of curt sentences, inadequate to stimulate the reader's interest or win his consent, the later, more energetic treatment is often to be preferred. And much more of the writer's attitude toward his own time emerges as we read of his abhorrence of the Civil War, his adulation of Charles I, distrust of Quakers, scorn of Protestant nonconformists but belief that “heathens” might be saved.

These expansions and revisions almost amount to a third century. In it we have added variety and a fuller portrait of the writer's mind. But the whole body of work, early and late, does not record a marked shift of interests such as we find in the 1612 and 1625 collections of Bacon's Essays, compared with those of 1597. As Mr. Jacob Zeitlin has shown, many essays in the 1612 edition evince “a different moral atmosphere … a general loftiness of tone … a generous disdain of all that is ignoble,” whereas those introduced in 1625 often deal with “topics which are either aesthetic or scientific and involve no ethical values.”⁷ In comparison, Felltham's sphere of interests expands more predictably. And certainly we find nothing similar to the developing perspectives of Montaigne's second and even more of his third book of essays, when contrasted with his first.⁸ No, even in these later “resolves” Felltham moves without purpose or progress from topic to topic, turning without discomposure from “Of Play and Gaming” to “Prayer most needful in the Morning.” Only the last four in his revised edition suggest a sequence: “Of Law,” “Of Conscience,” “Of Peace,” “Of Divine Providence,” but the possibility inheres more in the titles than in the discourse.

This seesawing of attention is the occupational fault of the writer expert in sententiae, especially when his philosophical (or in Felltham's case religious) beliefs have no organic connection with his methods of observation. Later essayists like Emerson and Thoreau, also specialists of the sentence, could evolve a moulded paragraph out of the sentences and, at their best, perfect the larger structure of chapter or book because their convictions about what can be seen into were organically related to concrete ways of seeing. But Felltham's occasionally Stoic attitudes or pervasive Christian conviction rarely act upon his faculties of perception. What lends life to his writing is accuracy of language. He observes with words given by words rather than with words given by eyes or ears.

Seventeenth-century admiration and imitation of the style of Seneca is well-known, and Felltham is usually taken as an exponent of this school. Thomas Randolph—like Felltham, a friend of Ben Jonson and a writer to whom Henry Vaughan was indebted—praised the Senecan qualities of prose in the Resolves.

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.
…
Well setled full of nerves, in breife 'tis such
That in a little hath comprized much. …(9)

And the modern scholar who has made the most thorough study of this tendency, George Williamson in his Senecan Amble, concludes that in addition to violence of metaphor, Felltham's “ornament derives from Senecan antithesis, with some parallelism and a touch of alliteration to set it off; again he is like the character-writers.”¹⁰

But to classify Felltham's prose in this way is too limiting. What matters is that he was a deliberate and knowing writer: a devoté of the “Graces” as well as a seeker of his muse. If he preferred the style coupé, the short coupled sentence, to the Ciceronian period, he merely shared a widely prevailing taste. It is more important that he had thought about style as the discipline that shapes meaning. In his elegy on Ben Jonson he expressed his knowledge that language to be commanded must be obeyed.

The Boy may make a Squib: But every line
Must be considered, where men spring a mine.
And to write things that Time can never staine,
Will require sweat, and rubbing of the braine.(11)

His essay “Of Preaching” reveals Felltham's admiration for the dramatic poetry of his age, superior in its “weighty lines” to the bad oratory and vain tautologies of many sermons. He is concerned with the preacher's opportunity to recapture the auditory which deserts him for the stage, or slumbers in the church. But apart from the various means he thinks available to this end, he has much to say that applies to writing generally, the best parts of which must be quoted:

A man can never speak too well, where he speaks not too obscure. Long and distended clauses, are both tedious to the ear, and difficult for their retaining. A sentence well couched, takes both the sense and the understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches, that are longer than the memory of man can fathom. … And this is Seneca's opinion: Fit words are better than fine ones. I like not those that are injudiciously made, but such as be expressively significant; that lead the mind to something, beside the naked term. And he that speaks thus, must not look to speak thus every day. A combed oration will cost both sweat, and the rubbing of the brain: and combed I wish it, not frizzled, or curled. … And even the Scriptures, (though I know not the Hebrew) yet I believe they are penned in a tongue of deep expression: wherein, almost every word, hath a metaphorical sense, which does illustrate by some allusion.

(I. 20, pp. 62-64)

Here we see the essentials of Felltham's thinking on style. First comes insistence on concision, especially by means of shorter sentences (not the only, not in every case the best means, one must add). Then, he is sensitive both to the aptness of words and their expressive significance. Words alone may lead us into metaphor.

Let us look at the vitality of these elements in Felltham's own writing, leaving to the last his sentence rhythm, and beginning with words. His idiom gains force from its exactitude. “They are bad works,” he wrote “that need rewards to crane them up withal” (I. 19, p. 61). He transmits his feeling for the action in verbs; he drafts nouns as verbs with good effect, observing for instance that base people “worship and knee them to the spending of a fair inheritance” (I. 53, p. 149) or that while poor men are sentinels against want, “the rich lie stoved in secure reposes” (I. 18, p. 53). The vigilant mariner who launches his boat with the first wind may meet a gale, but may “find the blast to womb out his sails more fully” (II. 61, p. 347). Felltham, like his mariner with the wind, is quick to take advantage of a strong word, but on the whole his vocabulary like his ethic represents a via media. He avoids ink-horn terms. An occasional specialism lends interest, as when we read that “A covetous man's kindness is like the fowler's shrape [snare]” (II. 70, p. 356) or that Satan's wiles are like the spots of the panther, “concealing the torvity [grimness] of her countenance” (II. 89, p. 376).¹² On the whole, there is little in Felltham's language that has become obsolete.

I do not share Mr. Williamson's view that we find in him a violence of metaphor. On the contrary, many of his metaphors serve a chiefly functional purpose: to clarify, make plainer or more memorable. The reader of idle books is like one who angles where he is sure “to strike the Torpedo, that instead of being his food, confounds him” (II. 1, p. 284). A virtuous man is compared to a lighthouse whereby mariners sail aright (II. 24, p. 307). Self-commendation “is an arrow with too many feathers: which we levelling at the mark, is taken with the wind, and carried quite from it” (II. 3, p. 287). Metaphors in which an image comes alive are less frequent: “What a skein of ruffled silk is the uncomposed man” (I. 2, p. 3). Sometimes a single word generates the life of the comparison: “Gold that lay buried in the buttock of the world: is now made the head and ruler of the people” (I. 34, p. 103).

The best metaphor discovers what otherwise could not be named. Of these we find few in Felltham. We start with interest, on reading that grief, like mist, “spoils the burnish of the silver mind” (I. 36, p. 105). Two of the most memorable metaphors in the Resolves are reincarnated in the poems of Vaughan: the soul as “a shoot of everlastingness” (I. 64, p. 174) and the ring of eternity. But by Vaughan's setting them in a slightly altered phrase they are infinitely enhanced.

Of the “Senecan” brevity of Felltham's sentences enough has perhaps been said by others, except that it should be added that he does not write in the abrupt manner known in his time as “Lipsius his hopping style.”¹³ His statements fall into the tone of suggestion, and the turning over of an idea, and usually avoid curtness. The fact that his essays in most cases lead to his own resolve allows him to take a smoother road than the humped imperative. Although he does not often shape his sentence to a rhythmic line, he can at times produce a rhythmic progress: “With what a cheerly face the golden sun chariots through the rounding sky? How perpetual is the maiden moon, in her just and horned mutations? … In the air, what transitions? and how fluctuous are the salted waves?” (I. 48, p. 134).

But this contemplative sequence is perhaps less characteristic than the brief aphorism (“An arrow aimed right, is not the worse for being drawn home”) (I. 45, p. 127) or the neat array of parallels or contrasts by alliteration: “I will in all losses, look both to what I have lost, and to what I have left” (II. 14, p. 298).

From these qualities of Felltham's style, from his success in achieving a conscious standard, we see that he had sought and been attended by the Graces. I proposed earlier that when he lags or is too obvious, it is the Muse that fails him. Often a title alone will prompt us to say “Of course—how can you bother to debate it?” as when, for instance, he sets forth to prove “That Policy and Friendship are scarcely compatible.” We do not expect much from resolves with titles like “That man ought to be extensively good” or “That Religion is the best Guide.” We feel impatient when Felltham is unobservant enough to believe that we may sometimes obtain good counsel from bad men (I. 33) or “that Man is neither happy nor miserable, but by Comparison” (I. 72, p. 196). We see that while the humane wisdom as well as the profounder insight of religious literature now suffer some neglect, in earlier periods the widespread and conventional acceptance of Christianity imperiled freshness of thought. Felltham is limited when he speaks most obviously to the condition of his generation. The Muse and the Zeitgeist are sometimes at odds.

But of the more than two hundred resolves that Felltham composed, the majority will give some reinforcement of knowledge, mood, or conviction to the thoughtful reader. In some, the current runs deeper, the whole discourse becomes memorable. In “Of Logic” he delights the reader by his ardent confrontation of all schemes of reasoning with the nakedness of truth. Unlike Montaigne, Felltham seldom makes room in his essays for the recreations of his mind—except as he allows us to see the use he makes of reading. But in “Of Poets and Poetry” his affectionate comments on the ways and disposition of poets show that he had been deservedly in their company.

The theme that truly united Felltham's powers is to be found in “Of Charity” (I. 86). “Charity is communicated goodness,” he begins, and we know at once that he will emancipate rather than confuse the inherent possibilities of meaning. He is himself emancipated here by faith and feeling. We notice this again in his treatment of related themes: his scorn “Of Arrogancy,” and repelling “Of Detraction.” And he is fit to praise humility as “of all moral virtues … the most beautiful” (II. 2, p. 285). He sees that magnanimity and humility are not opposed, they are “cohabitants” (II. 71, p. 357). He detests pride and cruelty as “curs of the same litter” (II. 97, p. 384). This ardent zest for decency rises to perception of the prime goodness in “Of Charity.” In this essay he transcends the via media for once:

The world, which is chained together by intermingled love, would all shatter and fall to pieces, if charity should chance to die. There are some secrets in it, which seem to give it the chair from all the rest of virtues. With knowledge, with valour, with modesty, and so with other particular virtues, a man may be ill with some contrary vice: but with Charity we cannot be ill at all.

(I. 86, pp. 235-236)

Here, the Graces and the Muses meet; this time Felltham might truthfully say “Both them I serve, and of their train am I.” In comparison with the more prudential tone of many of the other Resolves, in those radiating out of the theme of charity “Thought that was frozen up under stern experience gushes forth in feeling and expression. There is a freshet which carries away dams of accumulated ice.”¹⁴ His thought on this subject is always inspired by a generous sympathy for suffering. “Of Libelling against them that are fallen” (II. 56), or “Of Arrogancy” (I. 6) as well as the new essay “Of Alms” (10th ed. II. 79) reflect the instinctive desire to champion the modest, impoverished, or unfortunate against the overbearing and powerful. This current of Christian feeling is not only stronger than the traces of Stoicism that appear in the Resolves; it also has a liberating influence on Felltham's writing.

He chose a form of expression, the meditation on conduct leading to a resolution of the will, that suited the seventeenth-century meditative man but did not survive that century. The writer of miscellaneous prose is like an archer who, aiming at an outer circle of the target, may sometimes lodge his arrow in the center. Felltham's modesty led him to think that his prose, like his ethics, represented a mean between extremes. In the address to the reader provided for the later editions (surely his own, though couched in impersonal terms), it is said that his resolves “were written to the middle sort of people. For the wisest, they are not high enough; nor yet so flat and low, as to be only fit for fools. …” But this does not give a true sense of his endowments or of his delight in workmanship. Again he returned to deliberate on a writer's aim, and expanded his early essay “A Rule in Reading Authors.” Again he sought to relate the Graces and the Muses. He found them in the same path. “A good style, with good matter, consecrates a work to Memory; and sometimes while a man seeks but one, he is caught to be a servant to the other” (10th ed., p. 216). He finds that it may become a man both “to precept himself into the practice of Virtue, and to fashion both his Tongue and Pen, into the exercise of handsom and significant words” (p. 215). It is as if he knew himself that the Graces would lead him in the direction of the Muses when he maintains that “Wit is very near a kin to Wisdom” (p. 214). The later reader may stimulate his interest in human and humane convictions by turning over the leaves of Felltham. Or he may take more interest in the conscious stylist, expert in pointed sentences and brisk antitheses. But what is most likely to continue Felltham's hold on some favouring readers is his ability, in a sufficient number of his compositions, to link his charitable will, his steady grasp of experience, and his control of statement.

Felltham and Sir Thomas Browne were near-contemporaries, although the first edition of Resolves appeared almost twenty years before Religio Medici was published. The range, the diversity, the unfathomable imagination of Browne's prose make it irrelevant to compare them; yet humane qualities of mind and unique traits of expression make it allowable to set them side by side. The 1661 edition of Resolves is closer to the temper of Restoration prose; perhaps these later pieces by Felltham have some ancestral affinity with adept eighteenth-century essay writers who owe nothing to Browne.

But the incentives and temptations of writing for the periodical press differentiate Addison, Steele, and even Goldsmith from Felltham, who is never whimsical or arch, never constructs a personality for himself, and does not assume a social gathering as the milieu of the reader. The inwardness of the resolve, and the incorruptibleness of Felltham's primary muse, make it possible to see in him a partial predecessor of Thoreau.

After the victory of the plain style in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and Dryden's shaping of it into a more conversable and secular instrument, the fuller orchestration of Donne and Browne could not be used again. Its latent powers had to be regenerated in the nineteenth century, for new minds and new convictions. Underlying the explorations of Emerson and Thoreau particularly, the openness to wonder was prepared for by individual resolve.

These writers, and Hazlitt and De Quincey as well, were quite aware of the need to bring the graces and the muses into the same, or concentric circles. Dr. Johnson looked to neither of these visitors. He had learned from Browne, but nothing that he could really develop. His muse was his own indomitable will; he stands alone like the rock of Cashel.

Notes

1. For Felltham's biography see M. D. Cornu, “A Biography of Owen Felltham with Some Notes on His Poems and Letters,” University of Washington Digest of Theses I (Seattle, 1931), 139-142. This abstract contains information supplementing as well as correcting the article on Felltham in DNB [Dictionary of National Biography]. Further details are added in articles by Jean Robertson in NQ [Notes & Queries] CLXIII (1937), 381-389; MLN [Modern Language Notes] LVIII (1943), 385-388; MLR [Modern Language Review] XXXIX (1944), 108-115; and by Fred S. Tupper in “New Facts Regarding Owen Felltham,” MLN LIV (1939), 199-201.

2. The most detailed and accurate account of editions of Resolves is given in a forthcoming book by Ted-Larry Pebworth. (Not yet scheduled for publication).

   See also DNB and Cornu, pp. 140-141. In most editions the “century” written first stands, and will here be referred to, as the second century. Finally, in the eighth edition and the ones reprinted from it (9th, 10th, 11th), the original century was revised, and new pieces added. In this study, quotations will be made from the Temple Classics text (ed. Oliphant Smeaton, London, 1904; reprinted from the edition of 1628), except when the later versions of specific “resolves” are cited from my copy of the 10th (1677) edition. The designation of first or second century will be in roman numerals; of individual “resolves” in Arabic, and the page numbers are from Temple Classics edition, unless the tenth edition is specified. The copious use of italics has been removed from citations of passages from this edition.

3. Quoted in Tupper, p. 300.

4. There has been relatively little scholarly discussion of Felltham as an essayist or stylist. See Elbert N. S. Thompson, The Seventeenth-Century English Essay, University of Iowa Humanistic Studies III (Iowa City, 1928), pp. 74-76, 127-128; Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1945), pp. 190-192; George Williamson, The Senecan Amble (London, 1951), pp. 201-203; McCrea Hazlett “New Frame and Various Composition: Development of the Form of Owen Felltham's Resolves,” MP [Modern Philology] LI (1953), pp. 93-101. Ted-Larry Pebworth's forthcoming study gives a more thorough analysis of the evolution from the genre of “resolve” to something approaching the “personal essay” (his term).

5. His interest in it was typical of his age. See Philip Allerton Smith, “Neo-Stoicism in English Prose of the Seventeenth Century,” Harvard University Summaries of Theses (Cambridge, 1942), pp. 363-367.

6. Hazlett (note 4, supra) finds that 28 new resolves were added, 43 discarded; my reckoning is 27 new, 44 discarded. But as he rightly says, “Felltham's revisions were in some cases so complete as to preserve only a phrase or clause of the original. Such slight connections might escape even the most painstaking comparison” (pp. 93-94).

7. Jacob Zeitlin, “The Development of Bacon's Essays,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] (1928), 511, 513.

8. See Donald M. Frame, Montaigne's Discovery of Man (New York, 1955).

9. Thomas Randolph, “To M^r Feltham on his book of Resolves,” in Poems, ed. John J. Parry (New Haven, 1917), p. 126.

10. Williamson (see note 4), p. 202.

11. From “Elegies on Ben Jonson,” in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, XI (Oxford, 1952), 462.

12. All the italics in quotations from Felltham in this paragraph are mine, in order to single out special words.

13. See Williamson, ch. 5.

14. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston, 1906), VI, 89.