Owen Feltham Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Owen Feltham emerged from the uneasy middle of early Stuart England, a period when sermons, censorship, plague, and the pull of court culture pressed hard on private conscience. He was born in Suffolk, probably at or near Felsham, around 1602, into the provincial gentry world that supplied the educated laymen who read, copied, and argued over moral "characters" and essays. The sources are sparse and sometimes secondhand, but they consistently place him among the respectable, literate households for whom piety and social standing were inseparable.

Feltham came of age as the nation slid from Jacobean confidence into Charles I's disputes over religion and prerogative. The English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the upheavals that followed did not make him a public partisan in the way they did Milton or Marvell, yet the pressure of those years shaped the inward posture of his writing: watchful, moralizing, and steeped in the habit of self-scrutiny. He died around 1668, after the Restoration had reinstalled monarchy but not the old certainties, leaving behind a body of prose that reads like a private ledger of the age's ethical anxieties.

Education and Formative Influences

Little can be asserted with certainty about Feltham's formal schooling, but his prose reveals the usual armature of the educated English essayist: classical moral philosophy filtered through Christian devotion, commonplaces drawn from Seneca and other Latin moralists, and the Jacobean tradition of brief, aphoristic observation made popular by writers such as Bacon. He also absorbed the "character" writing and devotional essaying that trained readers to turn social life into moral case studies. In that sense, his education was as much a discipline of reading and excerpting as it was institutional, aimed at forming a gentleman capable of governing himself in a world that seemed increasingly ungoverned.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Feltham is remembered chiefly as the author of "Resolves: Divine, Moral and Political", first published in 1623 and repeatedly expanded in later editions, eventually forming a substantial compendium of short meditations on conduct, belief, and civic temper. The book belongs to the era's portable moral literature - a genre meant to be consulted, reread, and tested against daily life - yet its longevity suggests more than fashion. A later turning in his career was his translation from French of the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne's "The Gallery of Heroick Women" (1652), a work that, in Restoration-adjacent England, let Feltham explore virtue, fame, and moral exempla through portraits of celebrated women. The arc from "Resolves" to translation reflects a writer negotiating the century's widened horizons - continental Catholic literature on one side, English Protestant moral discipline on the other - while keeping his central project intact: the repair of the self.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Feltham's thought is a lay moral psychology shaped by the Protestant emphasis on inward examination and the classical belief that character is forged by habit. He distrusts enthusiasm that outruns charity, warning that "Zeal without humanity is like a ship without a rudder, liable to be stranded at any moment". In a century when religious intensity could harden into faction, the line reads as both ethical counsel and social diagnosis: the heart's heat must be steered by fellow-feeling, or it becomes self-wrecking. His recurring enemy is not merely sin in the abstract but moral drift - the slow surrender of intention to comfort and delay - captured in his insistence that "Negligence is the rust of the soul, that corrodes through all her best resolves". The imagery is telling: the soul is not shattered by a single blow so much as eaten through by unattended neglect, a view that aligns with his genre's purpose as a daily preservative.

Stylistically, Feltham writes in compact, balanced sentences built for memorability, often turning on antithesis and homely metaphor. The stance is neither purely courtly nor purely pulpit-driven; it is the voice of a reflective gentleman trying to make moral language usable under pressure. His emphasis on the mind's interior instruments also reveals an almost experimental curiosity about attention: "Meditation is the soul's perspective glass". The metaphor suggests that spiritual clarity is not granted automatically but achieved by disciplined focusing, as if the inward life required an optical tool to see proportion and distance. Across "Resolves", Feltham repeatedly treats virtue as a practice rather than a posture: the self is improvable, but only through steady acts of noticing, choosing, and correcting.

Legacy and Influence

Feltham never became a canonical "great" of English literature, yet his influence has been durable in quieter ways: he helped fix the English moral-essay tradition between Bacon and the later Augustans, and his aphorisms continued to circulate because they were designed to survive quotation. Modern readers meet him less as a biographical personality than as a mind at work under historical strain - a witness to how an ordinary-seeming life in a disordered century could produce extraordinary clarity about habit, zeal, and attention. For a quotes-and-biography culture, he remains valuable not merely for epigrams but for the integrated worldview behind them: an ethics of restraint, humane judgment, and daily maintenance of the inner life.