Advice to a Son: The Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne
About this ebook
This volume makes available three of the most famous sets of precepts. The manuals attributed to Lord Burghley and Sir Walter Raleigh and a treatise compiled by Francis Osborne are indicative of both the aspirations and the morals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they provide an index to the social attitudes of the age.
Immensely popular and influential, they were often reprinted, quoted from, and plagiarized. Some students of Shakespeare profess to see a parallel between Polonius advice to Laertes and Burghley's practical counsel to his son Robert.
The advice that these treatises offer is materialistic and even cynical, because the writers, moving in a political milieu, were realists who were attempting to provide instruction to their sons that would ensure success they would have cared not at all for the idealistic niceties. The distinction and position of Burghley and Raleigh may in part account for the popularity of their manuals in the seventeenth century, long after their deaths, but obviously both works possessed qualities congenial to the age, and readers approved of the way they mingled virtue and pragmatism.
Of the three works, Dr. Wright comments, Osborne's "must be regarded as a literary creation in addition to being a practical manual composed for the use of a particular person."
The student of English history will find this book a valuable addition to his library.
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About the author
Louis Booker Wright (1899-1984) was an American author, educator and librarian.
Born in Greenwood County, South Carolina on March 1, 1899, he attended Wofford College, where he enlisted in the Student Army Training Corps. He was subsequently stationed at Plattsburgh, New York, for six months during World War I. He did not return directly to Wofford after the war, but spent several months as an airmail pilot before resuming his studies. In 1920 he graduated from Wofford with a B.A. in chemistry.
In 1923, he became an English teaching assistant at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote his Master's thesis in 1924. In 1926, he received his Ph.D from Chapel Hill and became an Assistant Professor of English there. During this period, he married Francis Black. Louis and Francis moved to London in 1928 upon his reception of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 1931, he joined the staff of the Huntington Library as an administrator and scholar. Much of his research at the Huntington was concerned with the English Renaissance and the colonial period of the United States. While at the Huntington, he also served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, the California Institute of Technology, and Pomona College.
Before his appointment as director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1947, Wright was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by Princeton University. He officially began working for the Folger in the summer of 1948.
Among the organizations Wright served after his retirement in 1968 were the National Geographic Society, the Modern Language Association, and the Harry S. Truman Institute for National and International Affairs.
Wright died on December 26, 1984 of cardiovascular disease in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He is buried in West Oakwood Cemetery, Spartanburg, SC with his wife and her parents.
