SOURCE: Daniels, R. Balfour. “Resolves of a Royalist.” In Some Seventeenth-Century Worthies in a Twentieth-Century Mirror, pp. 140-44. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1940.

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...