[In the following essay, Daniels examines several of Felltham's poems, proverbs, and essays, arguing that while his style is not great, it is often engaging.]

Although the death of King Charles I caused many of his adherents to denounce the Roundheads and eulogize the King, no one seems to have gone further than Owen Feltham, who in writing an epitaph on that monarch “Inhumanly murthered by a Perfidious Party of His Prevalent Subjects,” declared, “Here Charles the First and Christ the Second lies.” Such extravagance of language was unusual with Feltham, who himself declared, “He is twice an ass that is a rhyming one”;¹ and for the most part his writings are sensible and moderate. He knew the wits and poets of his time and was given to writing poetry, although his chief claim to fame is his Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political, the first edition of which appeared when he was but eighteen years of age. Yet he was no mean poet, and his best known poem was good enough to be attributed to the famous Cavalier poet, Suckling, a matter for no small display of satisfaction; for one reads: “This ensuing Copy the late Printer hath been pleased to honour by mistaking it among those of the most ingenious and too early lost, Sir John Suckling.” The poem begins,

When, Dearest, I but think on thee,
Methinks all things that lovely be
          Are present, and my soul delighted:
For beauties that from worth arise,
Are like the grace of Deities,
          Still present with us, though unsighted.

In the fourth stanza one finds a watery metaphor:

The warring Sea can with such flood,
Bathe some high Palace that hath stood
          Far from the Main up in the River:
Oh think not then but love can do
As much, for that's an Ocean, too,
          That flows not every day, but ever.

The Resolves first appeared, probably about 1620, as one hundred brief essays; in the second edition, that of 1628, a “second century” were added to them; and by 1700 eleven editions of this work had appeared. Others were to follow. In fact an American edition of selections from the Resolves was published in 1832.

A moralizing and sententious essayist will attract readers in any age; and if he refers, as Feltham does, to writers of classical antiquity, he will not be neglected by the scholars. So Feltham appears as an essayist in the manner of Lord Bacon without that writer's conciseness and brilliance, and also as a forerunner of Emerson without the Sage of Concord's plenitude. Emerson's remarks on compensation and circles are quite Felthamian; witness the author of Resolves on “That All Things Are Restrained”:

When the Assyrians fell, the Persians rose. When the Persians fell, the Grecians rose. The loss of one man is the gain of another. It is vicissitude that maintains the world. As in infinite circles about one centre, there is the same method, though not the same measure; so in the smallest creature that is, there is the epitome of a monarchy, of a world, which hath in itself convulsions, arescations, enlargements, erections; which like props keep it upright, which way soever it leans.

Feltham feels not only the charm of the epigram but also the fascination of the paradox; and while he fails to display a Chestertonian mastery of that device, he certainly delights in it when he declares: “In apparel, especially for constant use, the positive is the best degree; good is better than the best.”² Here speaks the careful steward to the O'Briens, earls of Thomond, a man whose love of proverbial wisdom appears ever and again in his writings.

So serious in fact are most of the Resolves that one might begin to wonder whether their author had any sense of humor, a speculation that is quickly banished when one encounters his Brief Character of the Low Countries, an extravagant and fanciful account of Feltham's observations there, which may have amused the English but can hardly have pleased Flemish and Dutch readers if they ever encountered the work.

The subjects that Feltham treats are those that might engage the pen of any moral essayist—memory, fame, music, dancing, poets and poetry, hope, death, history, idleness, preaching, reprehension, envy, peace, business, ill company, and libelling, to mention a few. In general his remarks are practical and prudential and not without Christian charity, his style straightforward and sententious; but when he writes “Of Preparing Against Death,” the subject moves him to eloquence, and he says:

When the soul, like a swallow slipped down a chimney, beats up and down in restless want and danger, death is the open casement that gives her rest and liberty from penury, fears, and snares. It is nature's play-day, that delivers man from the thraldom of the world's school to the freedom of his father's family.

Owen Feltham like other Cavalier gentlemen was an amateur in letters. He wrote to please himself rather than others, he was ready to admit his ignorance of the Hebrew tongue, and he felt under no obligation to cite authorities for any statement that he made. “I do not profess myself a scholar,” he declared, “and for a gentleman I hold it a little pedantical.”

Notes

1. Of Poets and Poetry.

2. Of Apparel.