BRATHWAITE, Richard.

The English Gentleman: containing sundry excellent Rules or exquisite Observations, tending to Direction of every Gentleman, of selecter Ranke and Qualitie; how to demeane or accommodate himselfe in the manage of publike or private Affaires ...

London, Printed by John Haviland, and are to be sold by Robert Bostock ... 1630. Small 4to., pp. [10], 456, [6], with folding letterpress ‘Draught of the Frontispi[e]ce’ and engraved title-page; a very good copy in nineteenth-century polished calf, neatly rebacked, covers with gilt fillets and Greek key pattern in blind. First edition of a classic courtesy book describing the attributes of an English Gentleman under eight heads: youth, disposition, education, vocation, recreation, acquaintance, moderation, and perfection. The author was a well-read royalist country gentleman who emulates Burton’s Anatomy in the multitude and variety of his citations of authors ancient and comparatively recent. There is a well-known reference to ‘the amorous toyes of Venus and Adonis, which Poem, with others of like nature’, can inflame the inexperienced passions of youth (p. 28). Brathwaite, however, who as a young man wrote some plays now lost, approves moderate recourse to stage-plays (p. 195). But he condemns those who, ‘for want of better imployment, make [daily attendance] their Vocation’, and relates the sad case of a gentlewoman so obsessed with plays that on her deathbed, when exhorted to call upon God, only cried out ‘Oh Hieronimo, Heronimo, me thinkes I see the brave Hieronimo’, recalling The Spanish Tragedy. STC 3563; Wither to Prior, 66; Newberry 207.

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