509d Feltham, Owen. (1602?-1668) Resolves: divine, moral, political. The ninth impression. With new and severall other additions both in prose and verse not extant in the former impressions.

London: A. Seile, and are to be sold by Allen Bancks and Charles Harper at the Flower-de-luce in Fleetstreet over against Cliffords-Inn, 1670

$1,500

Folio, 6.3 x 4 in. The ninth edition, and second folio edition. π2, A6, B-Z4, Aa-Yy4, Zz6; a2-4, b-m4, n2. [Lacking a1, the separate titlepage for ‘Lusoria.’] The pages are in good, crisp condition with some browning on the edges. The engraved frontispiece is preceded by “The face of the book, unmasked.” This copy is bound in full modern calf, antique style.

“At the age of eighteen [Feltham] published a first version of the Resolves, a series of moral essays, by which he is chiefly known. ‘William Johnson, of the colledge of the Society of Jesus in Cadiz,’ told Feltham, in a letter dated December 1637 (printed at the end of Resolves, eighth edition), that he had ‘amongst catholicks lost a great deal of credit’ by his sixteenth Resolve ‘of the choice of Religion,’ which stated reasons for preferring the Anglican to the Roman church. Feltham replied that he was not a scholar by profession. ‘My books have been my delight and recreation, but not my trade, though perhaps I could wish that they had.’ Feltham’s poems exhibit strong roylist sympathies. In the last lines of the ‘Epitaph to the eternal memory of Charles the First […] inhumanely murdered by a perfidious party of his prevalent subjects,’ he talks of the dead king as ‘Christ the second.’ Feltham was well known to the literary men of his time. He replied to Ben Jonson’s ode, ‘Come leave the loathed stage’ (see Lusoria, number xx), and Langbaine preferred the ‘sharp reply made by the ingenious Mr. Feltham’ to the answers of Thomas Carew and Sir John Suckling.” (DNB)

“The first edition of Resolves (circa 1623) contained a hundred essays; the second (1628) had a second century; in the third (1628-9) and later impressions the order of the two centuries was reversed. Further changes were made in number and content. The folio of 1661 contained, besides the eighth edition of the Resolves, forty-one poems, some of which had been printed long before, letters, and the ‘Brief Character of the Low-Countries.’ The Resolves reached a twelfth and last edition in 1709.” (Bush)

Wing F-656.