Owen Feltham Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Overview
Owen Feltham was an English moralist and essayist best remembered for Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political, a compact book of meditations and aphoristic essays that circulated widely in the seventeenth century. Born in the early 1600s and dying around 1668, he wrote in a tone of devout reflection tempered by practical counsel, addressing the inner life of conscience and the outward conduct demanded by a turbulent age. Though the bare facts of his life are sparse, his pages speak with clarity about duty, moderation, humility, and the techniques of self-governance. His reputation rests on a careful balance: literary elegance without ornament, gravity without sourness, piety without sectarian sharpness.

Early Life and Background
Very little about Feltham's origins can be documented with certainty. Contemporary records do not securely fix his place of birth or particulars of his family. Internal evidence from his writings shows a speaker grounded in scripture, conversant with classical moralists, and alert to the social realities of gentry life in Stuart England. The learning displayed in Resolves suggests a solid if not formally distinguished education, and the calm, administrative cast of his advice hints at experience within a great household rather than the law courts or the universities. The England of his youth, shaped by the last years of Elizabeth I and the reigns of James I and Charles I, gave him a world in which moral counsel, courtesy, and political prudence were lived arts as well as literary subjects.

Service and Patrons
Feltham's most securely attested connection is with the powerful O'Brien family, Earls of Thomond, Irish peers who maintained substantial English interests. He appears to have served in their household in a managerial or secretarial capacity, work that would have demanded tact, literacy, and trustworthy judgment. In this sphere he would have known Henry O'Brien, 5th Earl of Thomond, a figure of consequence in the 1620s and 1630s, and later Barnabas O'Brien, 6th Earl, whose tenure straddled the civil conflicts of mid-century. The presence of such patrons placed Feltham near the currents of policy and estate governance. The duties of service to the Earls, from correspondence to account-keeping and mediation with tenants or officials, match the steady, worldly-wise note of his moral reflections. The Thomond circle, with its Anglo-Irish ties and its mix of courtly expectation and local authority, formed the practical school in which Feltham's counsel on discretion, loyalty, and measure took shape.

Resolves: Composition and Character
Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political first appeared in the 1620s and grew by accretion as Feltham revised, reorganized, and expanded the collection across multiple editions. The book presents short essays and meditations, often in a page or two, moving from topics of private discipline and devotion to questions of reputation, friendship, ambition, poverty, and the conduct of public men. Its language is tight and pointed; a single paragraph may end with a maxim sharp enough to stand alone in a commonplace book. The structure, arranged in numbered resolves, makes the volume a manual for recurring consultation rather than a narrative to be read straight through. Feltham's method is diagnostic as much as prescriptive: he dissects motives, distinguishes false from true courage, and weighs the claims of silence, patience, and charity.

Other Writings and Attributed Pieces
Several editions of his work and later miscellanies joined Feltham's name to other brief prose pieces circulating anonymously in his time. A Brief Character of the Low-Countries, under the States was at times associated with him, though attribution has been debated and cannot be affirmed with certainty. The attachment of that satire to his moral essays reflects the period's habit of gathering concise character writings under a familiar authorial banner. Whatever the authorship of these adjuncts, they reinforce the impression of a writer tuned to the short form: pithy, observational, and intent on extracting general rules from crowded public scenes.

Intellectual Setting and Style
Feltham wrote in the wake of the essay tradition that took strong English forms in the hands of Francis Bacon and Joseph Hall, and he shared their aim to compress experience into durable counsel. He differed, however, in the devotional current that runs through nearly every page of Resolves. Scripture is the final warrant for many of his claims, and his recommended virtues are distinctly Christian: humility, temperance, forgiveness, constancy under affliction. He draws on classical commonplaces while insisting that wisdom is tested in prayer, in the keeping of promises, and in the unshowy labors of vocation. His sentences are carefully balanced and often antithetical; he prefers clarity to ornament and cadence to metaphor. The result is a style at once homely and authoritative, designed to be remembered.

Historical Context
Feltham wrote and revised during an era that saw the reign of Charles I, civil war, regicide, a republican interregnum, and the Restoration. He does not write as a polemicist, and Resolves avoids party heat, but his subjects are those of a country under strain: how to maintain integrity in service, how to suffer loss without bitterness, how to hold prudence and courage together when both are demanded. The household of the Earls of Thomond, whether under Henry O'Brien or Barnabas O'Brien, gave him daily contact with the pressures of property, loyalty, and political weather. His answer is a steady ethic of self-rule, charity, and measured speech.

Reception and Legacy
Resolves enjoyed a long life in print. Seventeenth-century readers returned to it for its practical wisdom and spiritual steadiness, and new editions kept the book before an audience that included clergy, gentry stewards, and educated lay readers. Its maxims entered commonplace books and were quoted in sermons and letters. Later centuries valued Feltham as a minor classic of English moral prose: not a system-builder, but a maker of sentences that travel. His name became a touchstone for the short, serious counsel-piece: readable in fragments, cumulative in influence. The durability of Resolves rests on its usefulness; readers continue to find in it a lucid voice that treats private character as the foundation of all public action.

Final Years and Death
Records of Feltham's last decades are scarce. He appears to have continued quietly in service and letters, revising his work rather than launching new large projects. He died around 1668, likely in England. The reticence of the archival trail fits the tenor of his writing: a life disposed toward duty more than display. What remains above all is the book that bears his stamp. Through the patronage environment of Henry O'Brien and Barnabas O'Brien and the pressures of a changeable century, Feltham fashioned a companionable guide to conduct, a book of resolves that outlived the circumstances that prompted them.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Owen, under the main topics: Wisdom - Embrace Change - Meditation - Humility - Kindness.