Advice to a Son

“Guides to conduct are common to all ages, for writers never cease to believe that the distillation of their wisdom will in some fashion improve the behavior of youth and provide useful instruction to their elders. The sixteenth century was a particularly didactic age and had more than its share of self-appointed instructors with faith in their missions.” So writes Louis B. Wright in his Introduction to Advice to a Son.

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.