OWEN FELLTHAM had Bacon for a master, and in brevity and wit he is a worthy pupil of that greatest of English moralists. He owes to Bacon as much as Earle and Fuller do to Theophrastus,—but no more, however, for his is one of those rare intellects whose thronging imaginations impel expression without any other effort than that of limitation and direction. Hallam, who has attacked Felltham, illustrates in his own style and literary methods a wholly different school of essay writers,—a school whose excellencies, high and frequent as they are, do not detract from, but rather enhance, grateful appreciation of the concise sentences, the clearly defined metaphors, the frequent illustrations, and the never-to-be-too-much-admired brevity of the school of which Felltham is an ornament. Hallam, Gibbon, and Dr. Samuel Johnson are very largely responsible by their combined examples for the interminable length of the critical reviews and political disquisitions of the nineteenth century.

  If, as has been said, the whole art of eloquence consists of saying enough and stopping, no one who concludes that Felltham’s methods are the best possible for his purposes, need be ashamed of admiring him now, as warmly as he was admired by his contemporaries. His admirable essay on “Loquacity and Tediousness in Discourse,” says all that needs to be said to avenge, if not to vindicate him, when the faults of his style are measured against those of the writers who pile up clause on clause, until the average mind can no longer endure the burden of the accumulated load. Felltham is pedantic, but he is simple. He is given to preaching, but the longest of his sermons will give no man a chance to nod for weariness. He is “full of affectation,” but it is the affectation of a mind like that of Shakespeare—a mind into which the whole visible world crowds itself until he cannot but know the subtle relations and resemblances which to others seem strange and unreal. He has the unmistakable marks of genius. Talent we have always with us, but it is not often in the course of the centuries that young writers, or old ones either, can get rid of the perpetual self-consciousness which shuts out the influx of such varied knowledge of the realities of things as Felltham shows in his “Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political,”—a work written, it is said, in his eighteenth year. Little is known of his history. He was born at Mutford, in Suffolk, probably in 1602, and his middle life was involved in the quarrel between King and Parliament, in which he sided warmly with the King. He died in Northamptonshire in 1668. Aside from its own interest, his prose is so obviously a result of the same forces which evolved the Shakespearean cycle of poets, that on this account, if no other, he would deserve the most careful study. But for those who have listened long to the “tumult of discourse” from great nineteenth-century apostles of higher criticism, Felltham’s highly moral method of getting at, around, and to the end of his subject when he moralizes cannot fail to be a relief and a refreshment.