John Brown (essayist)

thumb|Now let us thank the Eternal Power: convincedThat Heaven but tries our virtue by affliction,—That oft the cloud which wraps the present hourServes but to brighten all our future days. thumb|Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times title page, 1757 John Brown (5 November 1715 – 23 September 1766) was an English divine and author. Quotes Now let us thank the Eternal Power: convincedThat Heaven but tries our virtue by affliction,—That oft the cloud which wraps the present hourServes but to brighten all our future days. Barbarossa (1754), Act V, Scene 3 And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin. "An Essay on Satire, occasioned by the Death of Mr. Pope" Quotes about John Brown I remember in the beginning of what has lately been called the seven years war, that an eloquent writer and ingenious speculator, Dr. Browne, upon some reverses which happened in the beginning of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to prove that the distinguishing features of the people of England had been totally changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thought a great consolation to us the light people of this country (who were and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate) that we had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst, in that splenetick mood, we amused ourselves in a sour critical speculation, of which we were ourselves the objects, and in which every man lost his particular sense of the publick disgrace in the epidemic nature of the distemper; whilst, as in the Alps, Goitre kept Goitre in countenance; whilst we were thus abandoning ourselves to a direct confession of our inferiority to France, and whilst many, very many, were ready to act upon a sense of that inferiority, a few months effected a total change in our variable minds. We emerged from the gulph of that speculative despondency, and were buoyed up to the highest point of practical vigour. Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy, nor ever did it's genius soar with a prouder pre-eminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character, by the good people of this kingdom. Edmund Burke, Two Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament, on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (1796), pp. 9-10 The inestimable estimate of BrownRose like a paper kite, and charmed the town;But measures, planned and executed well,Shifted the wind that raised it, and it fell.He trod the very self-same ground you tread.And victory refuted all he said. William Cowper, 'Table Talk', in William Cowper, Poems. Vol. I (1806), p. 21 The nation was in a state of angry and sullen despondency, almost unparalleled in history. People have, in all ages, been in the habit of talking about the good old times of their ancestors, and the degeneracy of their contemporaries. This is in general merely a cant. But in 1756 it was something more. At this time appeared Brown's Estimate, a book now remembered only by the allusions in Cowper's Table Talk and in Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. It was universally read, admired, and believed. The author fully convinced his readers that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that nothing could save them; that they were on the point of being enslaved by their enemies, and that they richly deserved their fate. Such were the speculations to which ready credence was given at the outset of the most glorious war in which England had ever been engaged. Thomas Babington Macaulay, 'William Pitt, Earl of Chatham', The Edinburgh Review (January 1834), in Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, contributed to the Edinburgh Review. Vol. I (1856), p. 302 External links Category:Poets from England Category:Playwrights from England Category:Essayists from England Category:Satirists from England Category:Clergy Category:Anglicans from the United Kingdom Category:Suicides Category:1715 births Category:1766 deaths