Summary (part 2)

The T-form, the medallion-form, and (occasionally) the animal forms occur in Anglo-Saxon graves in England. In Kent the medallion-form predominates. The Anglo-Saxon brooches were exquisite works of art, ingeniously and tastefully constructed. They are often of gold, with a central boss, exquisitely decorated, the flat part of the brooch being a mosaic of turquoises, garnets on gold foil, mother of pearl, &c. arranged in geometric patterns, and the gold work enriched with filigree or decorated with dragonesque engravings.

The Scandinavian brooches of the Viking period (A.D. 800-1050) were oval and convex, somewhat in the form of a tortoise. In their earliest form they occur in the form of a frog-like animal, itself developed from the previous Teutonic T-shaped type. With the introduction of the intricate system of ornament described above, the frog-like animal is gradually superseded by purely decorative lines. The convex bowls are then worked à jour with a perforated upper shell of chased work over an under shell of impure bronze, gilt on the convex side. These outer cases are at last decorated with open crown-like ornament and massive projecting bosses. The geographical distribution of these peculiar brooches indicates the extent of the conquests of the Northmen. They occur in northern Scotland, England, Ireland, Iceland, Normandy and Livonia.

The Celtic group is characterized by the penannular form of the ring of the brooch and the greater length of the pin. The penannular ring, inserted through a hole at the head of the long pin, could be partially turned when the pin had been thrust through the material in such a way that the brooch became in effect a buckle. These brooches are usually of bronze or silver, chased or engraved with intricate designs of interlaced or dragonesque work in the style of the illuminated Celtic manuscripts of the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries. The Hunterston brooch, which was found at Hawking Craig in Ayrshire, is a well-known example of this style. Silver brooches of immense size, some having pins 15 in. in length, and the penannular ring of the brooch terminating in large knobs resembling thistle heads, are occasionally found in Viking hoards of this period, consisting of bullion, brooches and Cufic and Anglo-Saxon coins buried on Scottish soil. In medieval times the form of the brooch was usually a simple, flat circular disk, with open centre, the pin being equal in length to the diameter of the brooch. They were often inscribed with religious and talismanic formulae. The Highland brooches were commonly of this form, but the disk was broader, and the central opening smaller in proportion to the size of the brooch. They were ornamented in the style so common on Highland powder-horns, with engraved patterns of interlacing work and foliage, arranged in geometrical spaces, and sometimes mingled with figures of animals.

(A. H. Sm.)

The illustrations of this article are from Dr Robert Forrer's Reallexikon, by permission of W. Spemann, Berlin and Stuttgart.

BROOKE, FRANCES (1724-1789), English novelist and dramatist, whose maiden name was Moore, was born in 1724. Of her novels, some of which enjoyed considerable popularity in their day, the most important were The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763), Emily Montague (1769) and The Excursion (1777). Her dramatic pieces and translations from the French are now forgotten. She died in January 1789.

BROOKE, FULKE GREVILLE, 1ST BARON (1554-1628), English poet, only son of Sir Fulke Greville, was born at Beauchamp Court, Warwickshire. He was sent in 1564, on the same day as his life-long friend, Philip Sidney, to Shrewsbury school. He matriculated at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1568. Sir Henry Sidney, president of Wales, gave him in 1576 a post connected with the court of the Marches, but he resigned it in 1577 to go to court with Philip Sidney. Young Greville became a great favourite with Queen Elizabeth, who treated him with less than her usual caprice, but he was more than once disgraced for leaving the country against her wishes. Philip Sidney, Sir Edward Dyer and Greville were members of the "Areopagus," the literary clique which, under the leadership of Gabriel Harvey, supported the introduction of classical metres into English verse. Sidney and Greville arranged to sail with Sir Francis Drake in 1585 in his expedition against the Spanish West Indies, but Elizabeth peremptorily forbade Drake to take them with him, and also refused Greville's request to be allowed to join Leicester's army in the Netherlands. Philip Sidney, who took part in the campaign, was killed on the 17th of October 1586, and Greville shared with Dyer the legacy of his books, while in his Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney he raised an enduring monument to his friend's memory. About 1591 Greville served for a short time in Normandy under Henry of Navarre. This was his last experience of war. In 1583 he became secretary to the principality of Wales, and he represented Warwickshire in parliament in 1592-1593, 1597, 1601 and 1620. In 1598 he was made treasurer of the navy, and he retained the office through the early years of the reign of James I. In 1614 he became chancellor and under-treasurer of the exchequer, and throughout the reign he was a valued supporter of the king's party, although in 1615 he advocated the summoning of a parliament. In 1618 he became commissioner of the treasury, and in 1621 he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Brooke, a title which had belonged to the family of his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Willoughby. He received from James I. the grant of Warwick Castle, in the restoration of which he is said to have spent £20,000. He died on the 30th of September 1628 in consequence of a wound inflicted by a servant who was disappointed at not being named in his master's will. Brooke was buried in St Mary's church, Warwick, and on his tomb was inscribed the epitaph he had composed for himself: "Folk Grevill Servant to Queene Elizabeth Conceller to King James Frend to Sir Philip Sidney. Trophaeum Peccati."

A rhyming elegy on Brooke, published in Huth's Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, brings charges of extreme penuriousness against him, but of his generous treatment of contemporary writers there is abundant testimony. His only works published during his lifetime were four poems, one of which is the elegy on Sidney which appeared in The Phoenix Nest (1593), and the Tragedy of Mustapha. A volume of his works appeared in 1633, another of Remains in 1670, and his biography of Sidney in 1652. He wrote two tragedies on the Senecan model, Alaham and Mustapha. The scene of Alaham is laid in Ormuz. The development of the piece fully bears out the gloom of the prologue, in which the ghost of a former king of Ormuz reveals the magnitude of the curse about to descend on the doomed family. The theme of Mustapha is borrowed from Madeleine de Scudéry's Ibrahim ou l'illustre Bassa, and turns on the ambition of the sultana Rossa. The choruses of these plays are really philosophical dissertations, and the connexion with the rest of the drama is often very slight. In Mustapha, for instance, the third chorus is a dialogue between Time and Eternity, while the fifth consists of an invective against the evils of superstition, followed by a chorus of priests that does nothing to dispel the impression of scepticism contained in the first part. He tells us himself that the tragedies were not intended for the stage. Charles Lamb says they should rather be called political treatises. Of Brooke Lamb says, "He is nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, for one of Sophocles and Seneca.... Whether we look into his plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid with intellect." He goes on to speak of the obscurity of expression that runs through all Brooke's poetry, an obscurity which is, however, due more to the intensity and subtlety of the thought than to any lack of mere verbal lucidity.

It is by his biography of Sidney that Fulke Greville is best known. The full title expresses the scope of the work. It runs: The Life of the Renowned Sr. Philip Sidney. With the true Interest of England as it then stood in relation to all Forrain Princes: And particularly for suppressing the power of Spain Stated by Him: His principall Actions, Counsels, Designes, and Death. Together with a short account of the Maximes and Policies used by Queen Elizabeth in her Government. He includes some autobiographical matter in what amounts to a treatise on government. He had intended to write a history of England under the Tudors, but Robert Cecil refused him access to the necessary state papers.

Brooke left no sons, and his barony passed to his cousin, Robert Greville (c. 1608-1643), who thus became 2nd Lord Brooke. This nobleman was imprisoned by Charles I. at York in 1639 for refusing to take the oath to fight for the king, and soon became an active member of the parliamentary party; taking part in the Civil War he defeated the Royalists in a skirmish at Kineton in August 1642. He was soon given a command in the midland counties, and having seized Lichfield he was killed there on the 2nd of March 1643. Brooke, who is eulogized as a friend of toleration by Milton, wrote on philosophical, theological and current political topics. In 1746 his descendant, Francis Greville, the 8th baron (1710-1773), was created earl of Warwick, a title still in his family.

Dr A.B. Grosart edited the complete works of Fulke Greville for the Fuller Worthies Library in 1870, and made a small selection, published in the Elizabethan Library (1894). Besides the works above mentioned, the volumes include Poems of Monarchy, A Treatise of Religion, A Treatie of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, A Treatie of Warres, Caelica in CX Sonnets, a collection of lyrics in various forms, a letter to an "Honourable Lady," a letter to Grevill Varney in France, and a short speech delivered on behalf of Francis Bacon, some minor poems, and an introduction including some of the author's letters. The life of Sidney was reprinted by Sir S. Egerton Brydges in 1816; and with an introduction by N. Smith in the "Tudor and Stuart Library" in 1907; Caelica was reprinted in M.F. Crow's "Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles" in 1898. See also an essay in Mrs. C.C. Stopes's Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries (1907).

BROOKE, HENRY (c. 1703-1783), Irish author, son of William Brooke, rector of Killinkere, Co. Cavan, was born at Rantavan in the same county, about 1703. His mother was a daughter of Simon Digby, bishop of Elphin. Dr Thomas Sheridan was one of his schoolmasters, and he was entered at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1720; in 1724 he was sent to London to study law. He married his cousin and ward, Catherine Meares, before she was fourteen. Returning to London he published a philosophical poem in six books entitled Universal Beauty (1735). He attached himself to the party of the prince of Wales, and took a small house at Twickenham near to Alexander Pope. In 1738 he translated the first and second books of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and in the next year he produced a tragedy, Gustavas Vasa, the Deliverer of his Country. This play had been rehearsed for five weeks at Drury Lane, but at the last moment the performance was forbidden. The reason of this prohibition was a supposed portrait of Sir Robert Walpole in the part of Trollio. In any case the spirit of fervent patriotism which pervaded the play was probably disliked by the government. The piece was printed and sold largely, being afterwards put on the Irish stage under the title of The Patriot. This affair provoked a satirical pamphlet from Samuel Johnson, entitled "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage from the malicious and scandalous Aspersions of Mr Brooke" (1739). His wife feared that his connexion with the opposition was imprudent, and induced him to return to Ireland. He interested himself in Irish history and literature, but a projected collection of Irish stories and a history of Ireland from the earliest times were abandoned in consequence of disputes about the ownership of the materials. During the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 Brooke issued his Farmer's Six Letters to the Protestants of Ireland (collected 1746) the form of which was suggested by Swift's Drapier's Letters. For this service he received from the government the post of barrack-master at Mullingar, which he held till his death. He wrote other pamphlets on the Protestant side, and was secretary to an association for promoting projects of national utility. About 1760 he entered into negotiations with leading Roman Catholics, and in 1761 he wrote a pamphlet advocating alleviation of the penal laws against them. He is said to have been the first editor of the Freeman's Journal, established at Dublin in 1763. Meanwhile he had been obliged to mortgage his property in Cavan, and had removed to Co. Kildare. Subsequently a bequest from Colonel Robert Brooke enabled him to purchase an estate near his old home, and he spent large sums in attempting to reclaim the waste-land. His best-known work is the novel entitled The Fool of Quality; or the History of Henry Earl of Moreland, the first part of which was published in 1765; and the fifth and last in 1770. The characters of this book, which relates the education of an ideal nobleman by an ideal merchant-prince, are gifted with a "passionate and tearful sensibility," and reflect the real humour and tenderness of the writer. Brooke's religious and philanthropic temper recommended the book to John Wesley, who edited (1780) an abridged edition, and to Charles Kingsley, who published it with a eulogistic notice in 1859. Brooke had a large family, but only two children survived him. His wife's death seriously affected him, and he died at Dublin in a state of mental infirmity on the 10th of October 1783.

His daughter, Charlotte Brooke, published The Poetical Works of Henry Brooke in 1792, but was able to supply very little biographical material. Other sources for Brooke's biography are C. H. Wilson, Brookiana (2 vols., 1804), and a biographical preface by E. A. Baker prefixed to a new edition (1906) of The Fool of Quality. Brooke's other works include several tragedies, only some of which were actually staged. He also wrote: Jack the Giant Queller (1748), an operatic satire, the repetition of which was forbidden on account of its political allusions; "Constantia, or the Man of Lawe's Tale" (1741), contributed to George Ogle's Canterbury Tales modernized; Juliet Grenville; or the History of the Human Heart (1773), a novel; and some fables contributed to Edward Moore's Fables for the Female Sex (1744).

BROOKE, SIR JAMES (1803-1868), English soldier, traveller and raja of Sarawak, was born at Coombe Grove near Bath, on the 29th of April 1803. His father, a member of the civil service of the East India Company, had long lived in Bengal. His mother was a woman of superior mind, and to her care he owed his careful early training. He received the ordinary school education, entered the service of the East India Company, and was sent out to India about 1825. On the outbreak of the Burmese War he was despatched with his regiment to the valley of the Brahmaputra; and, being dangerously wounded in an engagement near Rungpore, was compelled to return home (1826). After his recovery he travelled on the continent before going to India, and circumstances led him soon after to leave the service of the company. In 1830 he made a voyage to China, and during his passage among the islands of the Indian Archipelago, so rich in natural beauty, magnificence and fertility, but occupied by a population of savage tribes, continually at war with each other, and carrying on a system of piracy on a vast scale and with relentless ferocity, he conceived the great design of rescuing them from barbarism and bringing them within the pale of civilization. His purpose was confirmed by observations made during a second visit to China, and on his return to England he applied himself in earnest to making the necessary preparations. Having succeeded on the death of his father to a large property, he bought and equipped a yacht, the "Royalist," of 140 tons burden, and for three years tested its capacities and trained his crew of twenty men, chiefly in the Mediterranean. At length, on the 27th of October 1838, he sailed from the Thames on his great adventure. On reaching Borneo, after various delays, he found the raja Muda Hassim, uncle of the reigning sultan, engaged in war in the province of Sarawak with several of the Dyak tribes, who had revolted against the sultan. He offered his aid to the raja; and with his crew, and some Javanese who had joined them, he took part in a battle with the insurgents, and they were defeated. For his services the title of raja of Sarawak was conferred on him by Muda Hassim, the former raja being deprived in his favour. It was, however, some time before the sultan could be induced to confirm his title (September 1841). During the next five years Raja Brooke was engaged in establishing his power, in making just reforms in administration, preparing a code of laws and introducing just and humane modes of dealing with the degraded subjects of his rule. But this was not all. He looked forward to the development of commerce as the most effective means of putting an end to the worst evils that afflicted the archipelago; and in order to make this possible, the way must first be cleared by the suppression, or a considerable diminution, of the prevailing piracy, which was not only a curse to the savage tribes engaged in it, but a standing danger to European and American traders in those seas. Various expeditions were therefore organized and sent out against the marauders, Dyaks and Malays, and sometimes even Arabs. Captain (afterwards Admiral Sir Harry) Keppel, and other commanders of British ships of war, received permission to co-operate with Raja Brooke in these expeditions. The pirates were attacked in their strongholds, they fought desperately, and the slaughter was immense. Negotiations with the chiefs had been tried, and tried in vain. The capital of the sultan of Borneo was bombarded and stormed, and the sultan with his army routed. He was, however, soon after restored to his dominion. So large was the number of natives, pirates and others, slain in these expeditions, that the "head-money" awarded by the British government to those who had taken part in them amounted to no less than £20,000. In October 1847 Raja Brooke returned to England, where he was well received by the government; and the corporation of London conferred on him the freedom of the city. The island of Labuan, with its dependencies, having been acquired by purchase from the sultan of Borneo, was erected into a British colony, and Raja Brooke was appointed governor and commander-in-chief. He was also named consul-general in Borneo. These appointments had been made before his arrival in England. The university of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of D.C.L., and in 1848 he was created K.C.B. He soon after returned to Sarawak, and was carried thither by a British man-of-war. In the summer of 1849 he led an expedition against the Seribas and Sakuran Dyaks, who still persisted in their piratical practices and refused to submit to British authority. Their defeat and wholesale slaughter was a matter of course. At the time of this engagement Sir James Brooke was lying ill with dysentery. He visited twice the capital of the sultan of Sala, and concluded a treaty with him, which had for one of its objects the expulsion of the sea-gypsies and other tribes from his dominions. In 1851 grave charges with respect to the operations in Borneo were brought against Sir James Brooke in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume and other members, especially as to the "head-money" received. To meet these accusations, and to vindicate his proceedings, he came to England. The evidence adduced was so conflicting that the matter was at length referred to a royal commission, to sit at Singapore. As the result of its investigation the charges were declared to be "not proven." Sir James, however, was soon after deprived of the governorship of Labuan, and the head-money was abolished. In 1867 his house in Sarawak was attacked and burnt by Chinese pirates, and he had to fly from the capital, Kuching. With a small force he attacked the Chinese, recovered the town, made a great slaughter of them, and drove away the rest. In the following year he came to England, and remained there for three years. During this time he was attacked by paralysis, a public subscription was raised, and an estate in Devonshire was bought and presented to him. He made two more visits to Sarawak, and on each occasion had a rebellion to suppress. He spent his last days on his estate at Burrator in Devonshire, and died there, on the 11th of June 1868, being succeeded as raja of Sarawak by his nephew. Sir James Brooke was a man of the highest personal character, and he displayed rare courage both in his conflicts in the East and under the charges advanced against him in England.

His Private Letters (1838 to 1853) were published in 1853. Portions of his Journal were edited by Captains Munday and Keppel. (See also Sarawak.)

BROOKE, STOPFORD AUGUSTUS (1832- ), English divine and man of letters, born at Letterkenny, Donegal, Ireland, in 1832, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1857, and held various charges in London. From 1863 to 1865 he was chaplain to the empress Frederick in Berlin, and in 1872 he became chaplain in ordinary to Queen Victoria. But in 1880 he seceded from the Church, being no longer able to accept its leading dogmas, and officiated as a Unitarian minister for some years at Bedford chapel, Bloomsbury. Bedford chapel was pulled down about 1894, and from that time he had no church of his own, but his eloquence and powerful religious personality continued to make themselves felt among a wide circle. A man of independent means, he was always keenly interested in literature and art, and a fine critic of both. He published in 1865 his Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson (of Brighton), and in 1876 wrote an admirable primer of English Literature (new and revised ed., 1900), followed in 1892 by The History of Early English Literature (2 vols., 1892) down to the accession of Alfred, and English Literature from the Beginnings to the Norman Conquest (1898). His other works include various volumes of sermons; Poems (1888); Dove Cottage (1890); Theology in the English Poets—Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns (1874); Tennyson, his Art and Relation to Modern Life (1894); The Poetry of Robert Browning (1902); On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (1905); and The Life Superlative (1906).

BROOK FARM, the name applied to a tract of land in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, on which in 1841-1847 a communistic experiment was unsuccessfully tried. The experiment was one of the practical manifestations of the spirit of "Transcendentalism," in New England, though many of the more prominent transcendentalists took no direct part in it. The project was originated by George Ripley, who also virtually directed it throughout. In his words it was intended "to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labour than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom by providing all with labour adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labour to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent and cultivated persons whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions." In short, its aim was to bring about the best conditions for an ideal civilization, reducing to a minimum the labour necessary for mere existence, and by this and by the simplicity of its social machinery saving the maximum of time for mental and spiritual education and development. At a time when Ralph Waldo Emerson could write to Thomas Carlyle, "We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform; not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket,"—the Brook Farm project certainly did not appear as impossible a scheme as many others that were in the air. At all events it enlisted the co-operation of men whose subsequent careers show them to have been something more than visionaries. The association bought a tract of land about 10 m. from Boston, and in the summer of 1841 began its enterprise with about twenty members. In September the "Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education" was formally organized, the members signing the Articles of Association and forming an unincorporated joint-stock company. The farm was assiduously, if not very skilfully, cultivated, and other industries were established—most of the members paying by labour for their board—but nearly all of the income, and sometimes all of it, was derived from the school, which deservedly took high rank and attracted many pupils. Among these were included George William Curtis and his brother James Burrill Curtis, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888), General Francis C. Barlow (1834-1896), who as attorney-general of New York in 1871-1873 took a leading part in the prosecution of the "Tweed Ring." For three years the undertaking went on quietly and simply, subject to few outward troubles other than financial, the number of associates increasing to seventy or eighty. It was during this period that Nathaniel Hawthorne had his short experience of Brook Farm, of which so many suggestions appear in the Blithedale Romance, though his preface to later editions effectually disposed of the idea—which gave him great pain—that he had either drawn his characters from persons there, or had meant to give any actual description of the colony. Emerson refused, in a kind and characteristic letter, to join the undertaking, and though he afterwards wrote of Brook Farm with not uncharitable humour as "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of reason in a patty-pan," among its founders were many of his near friends. In 1844 the growing need of a more scientific organization, and the influence which F.M.C. Fourier's doctrines, as modified by Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), had gained in the minds of Ripley and many of his associates, combined to change the whole plan of the community. It was transformed, with the strong approval of all its chief members and the consent of the rest, into a Fourierist "phalanx" in 1845. There was an accession of new members, a momentary increase of prosperity, a brilliant new undertaking in the publication of a weekly journal, the Harbinger, in which Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Francis G. Shaw and John S. Dwight were the chief writers, and to which James Russell Lowell, J.G. Whittier, George William Curtis, Parke Godwin, T.W. Higginson, Horace Greeley and many more now and then contributed. But the individuality of the old Brook Farm was gone. The association was not rescued even from financial troubles by the change. With increasing difficulty it kept on till the spring of 1846, when a fire which destroyed its nearly completed "phalanstery" brought losses which caused, or certainly gave the final ostensible reason for, its dissolution. The experiment was abandoned in the autumn of 1847. Besides Ripley and Hawthorne, the principal members of the community were Charles A. Dana, John S. Dwight, Minot Pratt (c. 1805-1878), the head farmer, who, like George Partridge Bradford (1808-1890), left in 1845, and Warren Burton (1810-1866) a preacher and, later, a writer on educational subjects. Indirectly connected with the experiment, also, as visitors for longer or shorter periods but never as regular members, were Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes A. Brownson, Theodore Parker and William Henry Channing, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The estate itself, after passing through various hands, came in 1870 into the possession of the "Association of the Evangelical Lutheran Church for Works of Mercy," which established here an orphanage, known as the "Martin Luther Orphan Home."

The best account of Brook Farm is Lindsay Swift's Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars and Visitors (New York, 1900). Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs (Boston, 1894), is by Dr J.T. Codman, one of the pupils in the school. See also Morris Hillquit's History of Socialism in the United States (New York, 1903).

(E. L. B.)

BROOKITE, one of the three modifications in which titanium dioxide (TiO2) occurs in nature; the other minerals with the same chemical composition, but with different physical and crystallographic characters, being rutile (q.v.) and anatase (q.v.) The two latter are tetragonal in crystallization, whilst brookite is orthorhombic. The name was given by A. Lévy in 1825 in honour of the English mineralogist H.J. Brooke (1771-1857). Two types of brookite crystals may be distinguished. The commoner type of crystals are thin and tabular, and often terminated by numerous small and brilliant faces (fig. 1); the faces of the orthopinacoid (a) and of the prisms (m, l) are vertically striated. These crystals are of a rich reddish-brown colour and are often translucent. Crystals of the second type have the appearance of six-sided bipyramids (fig. 2) owing to the equal development of the prism m {110} and the pyramid e {122}; these crystals are black and opaque, and constitute the variety known as arkansite.

The lustre of brookite is metallic-adamantine. There is no distinct cleavage (rutile and anatase have cleavages); hardness 5½-6; sp. gr. 4.0. The optical characters are interesting: the optic axes for red and for blue light lie in planes at right angles to each other, whilst for yellow-green light the crystals are uniaxial. The acute bisectrix of the optic axes is perpendicular to the orthopinacoid (a) for all colours, so that this phenomenon of the crossing of the optic axial planes may be readily observed in the thin tabular crystals of the first-mentioned type.

Brookite occurs only as crystals, never in compact masses, and is usually associated with either anatase or rutile. The crystals are found attached to the walls of cavities in decomposed igneous rocks and crystalline schists; it is also found as minute isolated crystals in many sedimentary rocks. The best-known locality is Fronolen near Tremadoc in North Wales, where crystals of the thin tabular habit occur with crystallized quartz, albite and anatase on the walls of crevices in diabase. Similar crystals of relatively large size are found attached to gneiss at several places in the Swiss and Tirolese Alps. Thicker crystals of prismatic, rather than tabular, habit and of a rich red colour combined with considerable transparency and brilliancy are found in the gold-washings of the Sanarka river in the southern Urals. The arkansite variety occurs with rutile in the elaeolite-syenite of Magnet Cove in Hot Spring county, Arkansas. Minute crystals of brookite have been detected with anatase and rutile in the iron-ore of Cleveland in Yorkshire.

Crystals of brookite, as well as of anatase and rutile, have been prepared artificially by the interaction of steam and titanium fluoride, the particular modification of titanium dioxide which results depending on the temperature at which the reaction takes place. Brookite is liable to become altered to rutile: aggregates of rutile needles with the form of brookite (arkansite) are not uncommon at Magnet Cove, Arkansas.

(L. J. S.)

BROOKLIME, known botanically as Veronica Beccabunga (natural order Scrophulariaceae), a succulent herb growing on margins of brooks and ditches in the British Isles, and a native of Europe, north Africa and north and western Asia. It has smooth spreading branches, blunt oblong leaves and small bright blue or pink flowers.

BROOKLINE, a township of Norfolk county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., about 3 m. S.W. of Boston, lying immediately S. of the Back Bay district. Pop. (1890) 12,103; (1900) 19,935, of whom 6536 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 27,792. The area of the township in 1906 was 6.75 sq. m. It is served by the Boston & Albany railway, and is connected with Boston by an electric line. Brookline is the wealthiest of the residential suburbs of Boston; and contains a number of beautiful estates and homes. Within its limits are the villages of Cottage Farm, Longwood, and Reservoir Station, or Chestnut Hill—the Chestnut Hill reservoir is just beyond the township. Brookline has an excellent public library. At Clyde Park are the grounds and club-house of the Boston Country Club. Brookline has long been regarded as a model city suburb. It is connected with Boston Common by boulevards of the Metropolitan Park System. The first settlement was probably made about 1635, and it was called Muddy River until 1705, when it was created a township under the name of Brookline. Up to 1793 it belonged to Suffolk county, of which Boston is a part, and since that time it has belonged to Norfolk county; but Boston has in its growth almost surrounded it, and because of its great wealth there has been a long struggle for and against its merger in Boston. Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape gardener, had his home in Brookline, where there are various examples of his work.

See H.F. Woods, Historical Sketches of Brookline (Boston, 1874); C.K. Bolton, Brookline, The History of a Favored Town (Brookline, 1897); and J.W. Denehy, History of Brookline, 1630-1906(Allston, Mass., 1907).

BROOKLYN, formerly a city of New York state, U.S.A., but since 1898 a borough of New York City (q.v.), situated at the S.W. extremity of Long Island. It is conterminous with Kings county, and is bounded N. by the borough of Queens, from which it is in part separated by Newtown Creek; E. by the borough of Queens and Jamaica Bay; S. by the Atlantic Ocean; W. by Gravesend Bay, the Narrows, Upper New York Bay and East river, which separate it from Staten Island, Jersey City and the borough of Manhattan. It has a water-front of 33 m. and extends over an area of 77.62 sq. m. Pop. (1860) 279,122; (1870) 419,921; (1880) 599,495; (1890, then Kings county) 838,547; (1900) 1,166,582; (1905, state census) 1,358,686; (1910) 1,634.351. In 1900 only 310,501, or 26.6%, were native-born of native white parents; 355,697 were foreign-born, 18,367 were negroes, and 1206 were Chinese. Out of 332,715 males of voting age (21 years and over), 15,415 were illiterate (unable to write), and of these 14,159 were foreign-born.

Brooklyn is connected with Manhattan by three bridges across the East river—the lowest, known as the Brooklyn, opened in 1883; another, known as the Williamsburg or East River bridge, opened in 1903; and a third, the Manhattan, was opened in 1909. And a tunnel directly across from the south terminus of Manhattan was completed in 1907. Ferries ply at frequent intervals between numerous points on its west water-front and points in Manhattan; there is also ferry connexion with Jersey City. Brooklyn is served directly by the Long Island railway; by about fifty regular coast-wise and trans-Atlantic steamship lines; and by elevated or surface car lines on a large number of its streets. Subway lines, begun in 1904, connect Brooklyn with the subway system of Manhattan.

Streets and Buildings.—The surface of Brooklyn in the west section, from the lower course of the East river to Gravesend Bay, varies in elevation from a few inches to nearly 200 ft. above sea-level, the highest points being in Prospect Park; but steep street grades even in this section are rare, and elsewhere the surface is either only slightly undulating or, as in the east and south, flat. Most of the streets are from 60 to 100 ft. wide. The principal business thoroughfare is Fulton Street, which begins at Fulton ferry nearly under the Brooklyn bridge, runs to City Hall Park, and thence across the north central section of the borough. In the City Hall Park are the old city hall (now the borough hall), the hall of records, and the county court-house. Two blocks to the north (on Washington Street) is the post-office, a fine granite Romanesque building. The manufacturing and shipping districts are mostly along the west water-front. Here, on Wallabout Bay at the bend of the East river to the westward, is the New York navy yard, the principal navy yard of the United States, established in 1801, and commonly but incorrectly called the Brooklyn navy yard. It occupies altogether about 144 acres, contains a trophy park, parade grounds, the United States Naval Lyceum (founded 1833), officers' quarters, barracks, and three large dry docks (respectively 564, 465 and 307 ft. long), foundries and machine shops. A naval hospital (having accommodation for about 500 patients) to the east is separated from the navy yard by the largest and most interesting of Brooklyn's markets, the Wallabout (about 45 acres). The buildings of this market are Dutch in style and have a quaint clock tower. A little to the north of the navy yard are immense refineries of sugar. About 2 m. to the south, opposite Governor's Island, is the Atlantic Basin of 40 acres, with a wharfage of about 3 m. and brick and granite warehouses used largely for the storage of grain. A little farther south, on Gowanus Bay, is another basin, the Erie, of 161 acres, protected by a breakwater 1 m. in length, occupied by piers, warehouses, lumber depots and some of the largest dry docks in the United States; it also provides protection during winter to hundreds of canal boats. In this vicinity, too, are several yards for building yachts, launches and other boats. At the lower end of the west water-front, facing the Narrows, are a United States reservation and the harbour defences of Fort Hamilton.

For a considerable portion of its inhabitants Brooklyn is only a place of residence, their business interests being in the borough of Manhattan; hence Brooklyn has been called the "city of homes" and the "dormitory of New York." Residential districts with social lines more or less distinctly drawn are numerous. The oldest is that on Brooklyn (or Columbia) Heights, west of City Hall Park, rising abruptly from the river to a height of from 70 to 100 ft., and commanding a delightful view of the harbour. Here are hotels, large apartment-houses, many private residences and a number of clubs, including the Brooklyn, the Crescent, the Hamilton, the Jefferson and the Germania. On Park Slope, immediately west of Prospect Park, and St Mark's Avenue, in another part of the borough, are also attractive residential districts. The south shore of the borough has various summer pleasure resorts, of which Coney Island is the most popular.

Parks and Cemeteries.—One of the most attractive features of Brooklyn is Prospect Park, occupying about 516 acres of high ground in the west central part of the borough, on a site made memorable by the battle of Long Island. Its large variety of trees and shrubs, including oak, hickory, elm, maple, chestnut, birch, ash, cedar, pine, larch and sumach, its flower gardens, a palm house, ponds, a lake of 61 acres for boating, skating and curling, a parade ground of 40 acres for other athletic sports, a menagerie, and numerous pieces of statuary, are among its objects of interest or beauty. From the southern entrance to this park, Ocean Parkway, a fine boulevard, 210 ft. wide and planted with six rows of trees, extends 5½ m. south to Seaside Park (15 acres), on Brighton Beach, Coney Island. From the same entrance Fort Hamilton Parkway extends 4½ m. south-east to Fort Hamilton, and to Dyker Beach Park (144 acres) which face the lower end of the Narrows; and from Fort Hamilton, Shore Road and Bay Ridge Parkway extend north 4½ m. to Bay Ridge Park overlooking Upper New York Bay. From the northern entrance to Prospect Park, Eastern Parkway, another fine boulevard, 200 ft. wide, extends east 2½ m. to a point from which Rockaway Parkway runs 3 m. south-east to Canarsie Beach Park (40 acres), on Jamaica Bay; and extensions of Eastern Parkway run north-east through Highland Park (55 acres), to Brooklyn Forest Park (535 acres, on the border of the borough of Queens), abounding in beautiful trees and delightful views. Half a mile east of the borough hall is Washington or Fort Greene Park (30 acres), laid out on the site of earthworks (known as Fort Greene) constructed during the War of Independence, and commanding good views.

Greenwood cemetery, one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the United States, ½ m. east of Prospect Park, occupies about 478 acres. Among the principal monuments are those erected to Roger Williams, S.F.B. Morse, Elias Howe, De Witt Clinton (colossal bronze statue by Henry Kirke Brown), Henry Ward Beecher, Peter Cooper, Horace Greeley, Henry Bergh, Henry George and James Gordon Bennett. At the main entrance is a beautiful gateway (of elaborately wrought brown stone), 142 ft. wide and having a central tower 100 ft. in height. Along the north-east border of the borough are Cypress Hills cemetery (400 acres), adjoining Brooklyn Forest Park, and the cemetery of the Evergreens (about 375 acres), adjoining Highland Park and partly in the borough of Queens.

In the plaza at the northern entrance to Prospect Park is a soldiers' and sailors' memorial arch (80 ft. in width and 71 ft. in height), adorned with high-reliefs of Lincoln and Grant on horseback (by O'Donovan and Eakins) and with three large bronze groups (by Frederick MacMonnies). Immediately within the park there is a statue (also by MacMonnies) of J.S.T. Stranahan (1808-1898), who did more than any other man for the development of Brooklyn's system of parks and boulevards. On the slope of Lookout Hill (185 ft.) within the park is a shaft erected in 1895 to the memory of the Maryland soldiers who valiantly defended the rear of the American army at the battle of Long Island. A bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln overlooks the lake. In Fort Greene Park is a monument to the memory of the soldiers who died in the British prison ships during the War of Independence, many of them having been buried in a vault below. Facing the borough hall is a statue in bronze (by J.Q.A. Ward) of Henry Ward Beecher, mounted on a granite pedestal with a figure at one side to commemorate Beecher's sympathy for the slave. A fine bronze statue of Alexander Hamilton (by W.O. Partridge, b. 1861) stands at the entrance of the Hamilton Club in Clinton Street and one of U.S. Grant (also by Partridge) stands at the entrance of the Union League Club in Bedford Avenue.

Education.—The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences embraces twenty-six departments, of which those of music, philology and the fine arts have each more than 1000 members; the total membership of all departments in 1906 was 5894. The museum building of this institution is in Institute Park, which is separated from Prospect Park on the north-east by Flatbush Avenue. It contains, besides paintings and statuary, special collections for service in nearly all of the departments; among its purely art collections the most notable is that of J.J.J. Tissot's water-colour drawings, to illustrate the life of Christ. Since 1890 the Institute has received appropriations from the city, but it is maintained chiefly by private contributions. It is the outgrowth of the Apprentices' Library Association, founded in 1824, of which General Lafayette laid the corner-stone on the 4th of July of that year. In 1888 Franklin W. Hooper (b. 1851), who did much to increase the efficiency of the work of the Institute, became director. Pratt Institute, founded in 1887 by Charles Pratt (1830-1891), and the residuary legatee of his wife, who died in 1907, is one of the most successful manual and industrial training schools in the country, and its kindergarten normal is one of the best known in the United States. The Polytechnic Institute, opened in 1855, is a high-grade school of science and liberal arts. It has two general departments, the college of arts and engineering and the preparatory school, which are conducted independently of one another. In connexion with the college there is provision for graduate study and for night courses, and there are teachers' courses to which women are admitted. The Packer Collegiate Institute, opened as the successor of the Brooklyn Female Academy, in 1854, and endowed by Mrs Harriet L. Packer, an institution for women, has primary, preparatory, academic and collegiate departments. Adelphi College, opened in 1896, is for both sexes and gives special attention to normal training; it is the outgrowth of Adelphi Academy, founded in 1869, now the preparatory department. St Francis' College, opened in 1858, and St John's College, opened in 1870, are institutions maintained by Roman Catholics. Here, too, are the law school of St Lawrence University, the Long Island Hospital Medical College, with a training school for nurses, the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy and several schools of music. Brooklyn's public schools rank especially high; among them there is a commercial high school and a manual training high school. Among the larger libraries of the borough are the Brooklyn public library, those of the Long Island Historical Society, on Brooklyn Heights, of Pratt Institute, and of the King's County Medical Society, and a good law library. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which occupies an attractive building near the borough hall, has been a newspaper of strong influence in the community. It was established in 1841 as a Democratic organ, and Walt Whitman was its editor for about a year during its early history.

Brooklyn is well provided with charitable institutions, and has long been known as the "city of churches," probably from the famous clergymen who have lived there. Among them were Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Plymouth church (Congregational) from 1847 to 1887; Lyman Abbott, pastor of the same church from 1887 to 1898; Thomas De Witt Talmage, pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle (Presbyterian) from 1869 to 1894; Richard Salter Storrs (1821-1900), pastor of the church of the Pilgrims (Congregational) from 1846 to 1899; and Theodore L. Cuyler (1822-1909), pastor of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian church from 1860 to 1890.

Manufactures and Commerce.—The borough of Brooklyn is one of the most important manufacturing centres in the United States, most of the factories being located along or near the East river north of the Brooklyn bridge. The total value of the manufactured products in 1890 was $270,823,754 and in 1900, $342,127,124, an increase during the decade of 26.3%. In 1905 the total value of the borough's manufactured product (under the factory system) was $373,462,930, or 15% of the total manufactured product of the state of New York. Brooklyn's largest manufacturing industry is the refining of sugar, about one-half of the sugar consumed in the United States being refined here; in 1900 the product of the sugar and molasses refining establishments was valued at $77,942,997. Brooklyn is also an important place for the milling of coffee and spices (the 1905 product was valued at $15,274,092), the building of small boats, and the manufacture of foundry and machine shop products, malt liquors, barrels, shoes, chemicals, paints, cordage, twine, and hosiery and other knitted goods. Of its large commerce, grain is the chief commodity; it is estimated that about four-fifths of that exported from the port of New York is shipped from here, and the borough's grain elevators have an estimated storage capacity of about 20,000,000 bushels.

The water-supply system is owned and operated by the borough; the water is derived from streams flowing southward in the sparsely settled area east of the borough, and also from driven wells in the same region; it is pumped by ten engines at Ridgewood to a reservoir having a capacity of about 300,000,000 gallons, while a part of it is re-pumped to a high service reservoir near the north entrance to Prospect Park for the service of the most elevated part of the borough. Besides this system some towns in the south section recently annexed have their own water-supply.

History.—The first settlement within the present limits of Brooklyn was made in 1636, when some Dutch farmers took up their residence along the shore of Gowanus Bay. About the same time other Dutch farmers founded Flatlands (at first called Amersfoort), on Jamaica Bay, and a few Walloons founded Wallabout, where the navy yard now is. In 1642 a ferry was established across East river from the present foot of Fulton Street, and a settlement grew up here which was known as The Ferry. The next year Lady Deborah Moody with some followers from New England founded Gravesend near the southern extremity of the borough. Finally, in the year 1645, a settlement was established near the site of the present borough hall, and was called Breuckelen (also spelled Breucklyn, Breuckland, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland and Brookline) until about the close of the 18th century, when its orthography became fixed as Brooklyn. The name, Breuckelen, meaning marsh land, seems to have been suggested by the resemblance of the situation of the settlement to that of Breuckelen, Holland. Of the other towns which were later united to form the borough, New Utrecht was settled about 1650, Flatbush (at first called Medwoud, Midwout or Midwood) about 1651, Bushwick and Williamsburg in 1660. All of the settlements were for a long time chiefly agricultural communities. Flatbush was for a few years immediately preceding 1675 the largest; but Brooklyn was the first (1646) to have a township organization, and within a few years Wallabout, Gowanus, The Ferry, and Bedford—a new settlement to the south-east of Wallabout, established in 1662—were included within its jurisdiction. In 1654 the municipal privileges of Brooklyn as well as of two of the other towns were enlarged, but with Dutch rule there was general discontent, and when, in 1664, Colonel Richard Nicolls came to overthrow it and establish English rule these towns offered no resistance. Nicolls erected the region composed of Long Island, Staten Island and Westchester into a county under the name of Yorkshire, and divided it into three ridings, of which Staten Island, the present county of Kings, and the town of Newtown in Queens, formed one. In 1683 the present county of Kings was organized by the first colonial legislature. During the War of Independence the chief event was the battle of Long Island, fought on the 27th of August 1776. In 1816, when the population of the town of Brooklyn was about 4500, its most populous section was incorporated as a village; and in 1834, when its population had increased to 23,310, the whole town was incorporated as a city. By 1850 its population had increased to 138,882. In 1855 Williamsburg, which had been incorporated as a city in 1851, and the town of Bushwick were annexed. Other annexations followed until the city of Brooklyn was conterminous with Kings county; and finally, on the 1st of January 1898, the city of Brooklyn became a borough of New York City.

See S.M. Ostrander, A History of Brooklyn and Kings County (Brooklyn, 1894); H.W.B. Howard (ed.), History of the City of Brooklyn (Brooklyn, 1893); and H. Putnam, Brooklyn, in L.P. Powell's Historic Towns of the Middle States (New York, 1899).

BROOKS, CHARLES WILLIAM SHIRLEY (1816-1874), English novelist, playwright and journalist, was born on the 29th of April 1816. He was the son of a London architect, and was articled in 1832 to a solicitor for five years. He became parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and in 1853 was sent by that paper as special commissioner to investigate the subject of labour and the poor in southern Russia, Egypt and Syria; the result of his inquiries appearing first in the form of letters to the editor, and afterwards in a separate volume, under the title of The Russians of the South (1856). He wrote, sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with others, slight dramatic pieces of the burlesque kind, among which may be mentioned Anything for a Change (1848), The Daughter of the Stars (1850). Brooks was for many years on the staff of the Illustrated London News, contributing the weekly article on the politics of the day, and the two series entitled "Nothing in the Papers" and "By the Way." In 1851 he joined the staff of Punch, and noteworthy among his numerous contributions were the weekly satirical summaries of the parliamentary debates, entitled "The Essence of Parliament." His long service as newspaper reporter gave him special aptitude for this playful parody. In 1870, on the death of Mark Lemon, "dear old Shirley," as his friends used to call him, was chosen to succeed to the editorial chair. His first novel, Aspen Court, was published in 1855. It was followed by The Gordian Knot (1860), The Silver Cord (1861) and Sooner or Later (1868). Brooks was a great letter-writer, deliberately cultivating the practice as an art, and imitating the style in vogue before newspapers and telegraphs suppressed private letters. He had an astonishing memory, was brilliant as an epigrammatist, was a great reader and a most genial companion. He was in his element with a group of children, reading to them, sharing their fun and always remembering the birthdays. He died in London, on the 23rd of February 1874, and was buried near his friends Leech and Thackeray, in Kensal Green cemetery.

See G.S. Layard, A Great "Punch" Editor: Being the Life, Letters and Diaries of Shirley Brooks (1907.)

BROOKS, PHILLIPS (1835-1893), American clergyman and author, was born in Boston, Mass., on the 13th of December 1835. Through his father, William Gray Brooks, he was descended from the Rev. John Cotton; through his mother, Mary Ann Phillips, a woman of rare force of character and religious faith, he was a great-grandson of the founder of Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. Of the six sons, four—Phillips, Frederic, Arthur and John Cotton—entered the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Phillips Brooks prepared for college at the Boston Latin school and graduated at Harvard in 1855. After a short and unsuccessful experience as a teacher in the Boston Latin school, he began in 1856 to study for the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the theological seminary at Alexandria, Virginia. In 1859 he graduated, was ordained deacon by Bishop William Meade of Virginia, and became rector of the church of the Advent, Philadelphia. In 1860 he was ordained priest, and in 1862 became rector of the church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, where he remained seven years, gaining an increasing name as preacher and patriot. Endowed by inheritance with a rich religious character, evangelical traditions, ethical temper and strong intellect, he developed, by wide reading in ancient and modern literature, a personality and attitude of mind which appealed to the characteristic thought and life of the period. With Tennyson, Coleridge, Frederic D. Maurice and F. W. Robertson he was in strong sympathy. During the Civil War he upheld with power the cause of the North and the negro, and his sermon on the death of President Lincoln was an eloquent expression of the character of both men. In 1869 he became rector of Trinity church, Boston. In 1877 the present church was finished, the architect being his friend H. H. Richardson. Here Phillips Brooks preached Sunday after Sunday to great congregations, until he was consecrated bishop of Massachusetts in 1891. In 1886 he declined an election as assistant bishop of Pennsylvania. He was for many years an overseer and preacher of Harvard University, his influence upon the religious life of the university being deep and wide. In 1881 he declined an invitation to be the sole preacher to the university and professor of Christian ethics. On the 30th of April 1891 he was elected sixth bishop of Massachusetts, and on the 14th of October was consecrated to that office in Trinity church, Boston. After a brief but great episcopate of fifteen months, he died, unmarried, on the 23rd of January 1893. Phillips Brooks was a tall, well-proportioned man of fine physique, his height being six feet four inches. In character he was pure, simple, endowed with excellent judgment and a keen sense of humour, and quick to respond to any call for sympathy. When kindled by his subject it seemed to take possession of him and pour itself out with overwhelming speed of utterance, with heat and power. His sympathy with men of other ways and thought, and with the truth in other ecclesiastical systems gained for him the confidence and affection of men of varied habits of mind and religious traditions, and was thus a great factor in gaining increasing support for the Episcopal Church. As years went by his influence as a religious leader became unique. The degree of S.T.D. had been conferred upon him by the universities of Harvard (1877), and of Columbia (1887), and the degree of D.D. by the university of Oxford, England (1885). In 1877 he published a course of lectures upon preaching, which he had delivered at the theological school of Yale University, and which are an expression of his own experience. In 1879 appeared the Bohlen Lectures on "The Influence of Jesus." In 1878 he published his first volume of sermons, and from time to time issued other volumes, including Sermons Preached in English Churches (1883).

In 1901, at New York, was published, in two volumes, Phillips Brooks, Life and Letters, by the Rev. A.V.G. Allen, D.D., professor of ecclesiastical history, Episcopal Theological school, Cambridge, Mass., who in 1907 published at New York, in a single volume, Phillips Brooks, an abbreviation and revision of the earlier biography.

(W. L.)

BROOKS'S, a London club in St James's Street. It was founded in 1764 by the dukes of Roxburghe and Portland. The building had been previously opened as a gaming-house by William Macall (Almack), and afterwards by Brooks, a wine merchant and money-lender, whose name it retained.

BROOM, known botanically as Cytisus, or Sarothamnus, scoparius, a member of the natural order Leguminosae, a shrub found on heaths and commons in the British Isles, and also in Europe (except the north) and temperate Asia. The leaves are small, and the function of carbon-assimilating is shared by the green stems. The bright yellow flowers scatter their pollen by an explosive mechanism; the weight of a bee alighting on the flower causes the keel to split and the pollen to be shot out on to the insect's body. When ripe the black pods explode with a sudden twisting of the valves and scatter the seeds. The twigs have a bitter and nauseous taste and have long had a popular reputation as a diuretic; the seeds have similar properties.

"Butcher's broom," a very different plant, known botanically as Ruscus aculeatus, is a member of the natural order Liliaceae. It is a small evergreen shrub found in copses and woods, but rare in the southern half of England. The stout angular stems bear leaves reduced to small scales, which subtend flattened leaf-like branches (cladodes) with a sharp apex. The small whitish flowers are borne on the face of the cladodes, and are succeeded by a bright red berry.

BROOME, WILLIAM (1689-1745), English scholar and poet, the son of a farmer, was born at Haslington, Cheshire, where he was baptized on the 3rd of May 1689. He was educated at Eton, where he became captain of the school, and at St John's College, Cambridge. He collaborated with John Ozell and William Oldisworth in a translation (1712) of the Iliad from the French version of Madame Dacier, and he contributed in the same year some verses to Lintot's Miscellany. He was introduced to Pope, who was at that time engaged on his translation of the Iliad. Pope asked Broome to make a digest for him of the notes of Eustathius, the 12th-century annotator of Homer. This task Broome executed to Pope's entire satisfaction, refusing any payment. He was rector of Sturston, Norfolk, and his prosperity was further assured by his marriage in 1716 with a rich widow, Mrs Elizabeth Clarke. When Pope undertook the translation of the Odyssey, he engaged Elijah Fenton and Broome to assist him. Broome's facility in verse had gained for him at college the nickname of "the poet," and he adapted his style very closely to Pope's. He translated the 2nd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 12th, 16th, 18th and 23rd books, and practically provided all the notes. He was a vain, talkative man, and did not fail to make known his real share in the translation, of which Pope had given a very misleading account in the "proposals" issued to subscribers. He casually mentioned Broome as his coadjutor, as though his assistance was of an entirely subsidiary character. His influence over Broome was so strong that the latter was induced to write a note at the end of the translation minimizing his own share and implicating Fenton, who, moreover, had not wished his name to appear, in the deception. "If my performance," he said, "has merit either in these [the notes] or in any part of the translation, namely the 6th, 11th and 18th books, it is but just to attribute it to the judgment and care of Mr Pope, by whose hand every sheet was corrected." For the Odyssey Pope received £4500, of which Broome, who had provided a third of the text and the notes, received £570. He had hoped to secure fame from his connexion with Pope, and when he found that Pope had no intention of praising him he complained bitterly of being underpaid. Pope thought that Broome's garrulity had caused the reports which were being circulated to his disadvantage, and ungenerously made satirical allusions to him in the Dunciad and the Bathos. After these insults Broome's patience gave way, and there is a gap in his correspondence with Pope, but in 1730 the intercourse was renewed on friendly terms. In 1728 the degree of LL.D. was conferred on him by the university of Cambridge, and he was presented to the rectory of Pulham, Norfolk, and subsequently by Charles, 1st Earl Cornwallis, who had been his friend at Cambridge, to two livings, Oakley Magna in Essex, and Eye in Suffolk. He died at Bath on the 16th of November 1745.

Broome was also the author of some translations from Anacreon printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, and of Poems on Several Occasions (1727). His poems are included in Johnson's and other collections of the British poets. His connexion with Pope is exhaustively discussed in Elwin and Courthope's edition of Pope's Works (viii. pp. 30-186), where the correspondence between the two is reproduced.

i. 146, "worthy Settle Banks and Broome." A footnote (1743) explained away the allusion by making it apply to Richard Brome, the disciple of Ben Jonson. Also iii. 332, of which the original rendering was:—

"Hibernian politics, O Swift, thy doom,

And Pope's, translating ten whole years with Broome."

In the Bathos he was classed with the parrots and the tortoises.

BROOM-RAPE, known botanically as Orobanche, a genus of brown leafless herbs growing attached to the roots of other plants from which they derive their nourishment. The usually stout stem bears brownish scales, and ends in a spike of yellow, reddish-brown or purplish flowers, with a gaping two-lipped corolla. Several species occur in the British Isles; the largest, Orobanche major, is parasitic on roots of shrubby leguminous plants, and has a stout stem 1 to 2 ft. high.

BROSCH, MORITZ (1829-1907), German historian, was born at Prague on the 7th of April 1829, was educated at Prague and Vienna, and became a journalist. Later he devoted himself to historical study, and he died on the 14th of July 1907 at Venice, where he had resided for over thirty years. To the series Geschichte der europäischen Staaten Brosch contributed England 1509-1550 (6 vols., Gotha, 1884-1899), a continuation of the work of J.M. Lappenberg and R. Pauli, and Der Kirchenstaat (Gotha, 1880-1882). He gave further proof of his interest in English history by writing Lord Bolingbroke und die Whigs und Tories seiner Zeit (Frankfort, 1883), and Oliver Cromwell und die puritanische Revolution (Frankfort, 1886). He also wrote Julius II. und die Gründung des Kirchenstaats (Gotha, 1878), while one of his last pieces of work was to contribute a chapter on "The height of the Ottoman power" to vol. iii. of the Cambridge Modern History.

See A.W. Ward in the English Historical Review, vol. xxii. (1907).

BROSELEY, a market town in the municipal borough of Wenlock (q.v.) and the Wellington (Mid) parliamentary division of Shropshire, England, on the right bank of the Severn. It has a station (Ironbridge and Broseley) on the Great Western railway, 158 m. N.W. from London. There is trade in coal, but the town is most famous for the manufacture of tobacco-pipes, a long-established industry. Pottery and bricks are also produced, and at Benthall, 1 m. W., are large encaustic tile works. The early name of the town was Burwardesley.

BROSSES, CHARLES DE (1709-1777), French magistrate and scholar, was born at Dijon and studied law with a view to the magistracy. The bent of his mind, however, was towards literature and science, and, after a visit to Italy in 1739 in company with his friend Jean Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye, he published his Lettres sur l'état actuel de la mile souterraine d'Herculée (Dijon, 1750), the first work upon the ruins of Herculaneum. It was during this Italian tour that he wrote his famous letters on Italy, which remained in MS. till long after his death. In 1760 he published a dissertation, Du culte des dieux fétiches, which was afterwards inserted in the Encyclopédie méthodique. At the solicitation of his friend Buffon, he undertook his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, which was published in 1756, in two vols. 4to, with maps. It was in this work that de Brosses first laid down the geographical divisions of Australasia and Polynesia, which were afterwards adopted by John Pinkerton and succeeding geographers. He also contributed to the Encyclopédie the articles "Langues," "Musique," "Étymologic." In 1765 appeared his work on the origin of language, Traite de la formation mécanique des langues, the merits of which are recognized by E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture. De Brosses had been occupied, during a great part of his life, on a translation of Sallust, and in attempting to supply the lost chapters in that celebrated historian. At length in 1777 he published L'Histoire du septième siècle de la république romaine, 3 vols. 4to, to which is prefixed a learned life of Sallust, reprinted at the commencement of the translation of that historian by Jean Baptiste Dureau de La Malle. These literary occupations did not prevent the author from discharging with ability his official duties as first president of the parliament of Burgundy, nor from carrying on a constant and extensive correspondence with the most distinguished literary characters of his time. In 1758 he succeeded the marquis de Caumont in the Académie des Belles-lettres; but when in 1770 he presented himself at the French Academy, his candidature was rejected owing to Voltaire's opposition on personal grounds. Besides the works already mentioned, he wrote several memoirs and dissertations in the collections of the Academy of Inscriptions, and in those of the Academy of Dijon, and he left behind him several MSS., which were unfortunately lost during the Revolution. His letters on Italy were, however, found in MS. in the confiscated library by his son, the émigré officer René de Brosses, and were first published in 1799, in the uncritical edition of Antoine Serieys, under the title of Lettres historiques et critiques. A fresh edition, freed from errors and interpolations, by R. Colomb, with the title L'Italie il y a cent ans, was issued in 1836; and two subsequent reprints appeared, one edited by Poulet-Malassis, under the title Lettres familières (1858); the other, a re-impression of Colomb's edition, under that of Le Président de Brosses en Italic (1858).

See H. Mamet, Le President de Brosses, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Lille, 1874); also Cunisset-Carnot, "La Querelle de Voltaire et du président de Brosses," in the Revue des Deux Mondes (February 15, 1888).

BROTHER, a male person in his relation to the other children of the same father and mother. "Brother" represents in English the Teutonic branch of a word common to the Indo-European languages, of. Ger. Bruder, Dutch broeder, Dan. and Swed. broder, &c. In Celtic languages, Gaelic and Irish have brathair, and Welsh brawd; in Greek the word is φράτηρ, in Lat. frater, from which come the Romanic forms, Fr. frère, Ital. fratello; the Span. fray, Port. frei, like the Ital. frate, fra, are only used of "friars." The Span. hermano and the Port. irmāo, the regular words for brother, are from Lat. germanus, born of the same father and mother. The Sanskrit word is bhrātār, and the ultimate Indo-European root is generally taken to be bhar, to bear (cf. M. H. Ger. barn, Scot, bairn, child, and such words as "birth," "burden"). "Brother" has often been loosely used of kinsmen generally, or for members of the same tribe; also for quite fictitious relationships, e.g. "blood-brothers," through a sacramental rite of mutual blood-tasting, "foster-brothers," because suckled by the same nurse. Christianity, through the idea of the universal fatherhood of God, conceives all men as brothers; but in a narrower sense "the brethren" are the members of the Church, or, in a narrower still, of a confraternity or "brotherhood" within the Church. This latter idea is reproduced in those fraternal societies, e.g. the Freemasons, the members of which become "brothers" by initiation. "Brother" is also used symbolically, as implying equality, by sovereigns in addressing one another, and also by bishops.

BROTHERS, RICHARD (1757-1824), British religious fanatic, was born in Newfoundland on Christmas day, 1757, and educated at Woolwich. He entered the navy and served under Keppel and Rodney. In 1783 he became lieutenant, and was discharged on half-pay. He travelled on the continent, made an unhappy marriage in 1786, and again went to sea. But he felt that the military calling and Christianity were incompatible and abandoned the former (1789). Further scruples as to the oath required on the receipt of his half-pay reduced him to serious pecuniary straits (1791), and he divided his time between the open air and the workhouse, where he developed the idea that he had a special divine commission, and wrote to the king and the parliament to that effect. In 1793 he declared himself the apostle of a new religion, "the nephew of the Almighty, and prince of the Hebrews, appointed to lead them to the land of Canaan." At the end of 1794 he began to print his interpretations of prophecy, his first book being A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times. In consequence of prophesying the death of the king and the end of the monarchy, he was arrested for treason in 1795, and confined as a criminal lunatic. His case was, however, brought before parliament by his ardent disciple, Nathaniel Halhed, the orientalist, a member of the House of Commons, and he was removed to a private asylum in Islington. Here he wrote a variety of prophetic pamphlets, which gained him many believers, amongst them William Sharp, the engraver, who afterwards deserted him for Joanna Southcott. Brothers, however, had announced that on the 19th of November 1795 he was to be "revealed" as prince of the Hebrews and ruler of the world; and when this date passed without any such manifestation, what enthusiasm he had aroused rapidly dwindled, despite the fact that some of his earlier political predictions (e.g. the violent death of Louis XVI.) had been fulfilled. He died in London on the 25th of January 1824, in the house of John Finlayson, who had secured his release, and who afterwards pestered the government with an enormous claim for Brothers's maintenance. The supporters of the Anglo-Israelite theory claim him as the first writer on their side.

BROTHERS OF COMMON LIFE, a religious community formerly existing in the Catholic Church. Towards the end of his career Gerhard Groot (q.v.) retired to his native town of Deventer, in the province of Overyssel and the diocese of Utrecht, and gathered about him a number of those who had been "converted" by his preaching or wished to place themselves under his spiritual guidance. With the assistance of Florentius Radewyn, who resigned for the purpose a canonry at Utrecht, he was able to carry out a long-cherished idea of establishing a house wherein devout men might live in community without the monastic vows. The first such community was established at Deventer in the house of Floentius himself (c. 1380); and Thomas à Kempis, who lived in it from 1392 to 1399, has left a description of the manner of life pursued:—

"They humbly imitated the manner of the Apostolic life, and having one heart and mind in God, brought every man what was his own into the common stock, and receiving simple food and clothing avoided taking thought for the morrow. Of their own will they devoted themselves to God, and all busied themselves in obeying their rector or his vicar .... They laboured carefully in copying books, being instant continually in sacred study and devout meditation. In the morning, having said Matins, they went to the church (for Mass) .... Some who were priests and were learned in the divine law preached earnestly in the church."

Other houses of the Brothers of Common Life, otherwise called the "Modern Devotion," were in rapid succession established in the chief cities of the Low Countries and north and central Germany, so that there were in all upwards of forty houses of men; while those of women doubled that figure, the first having been founded by Groot himself at Deventer.

The ground-idea was to reproduce the life of the first Christians as described in Acts iv. The members took no vows and were free to leave when they chose; but so long as they remained they were bound to observe chastity, to practise personal poverty, putting all their money and earnings into the common fund, to obey the rules of the house and the commands of the rector, and to exercise themselves in self-denial, humility and piety. The rector was chosen by the community and was not necessarily a priest, though in each house there were a few priests and clerics. The majority, however, were laymen, of all kinds and degrees—nobles, artisans, scholars, students, labouring men. The clerics preached and instructed the people, working chiefly among the poor; they also devoted themselves to the copying of manuscripts, in order thereby to earn something for the common fund; and some of them taught in the schools. Of the laymen, the educated copied manuscripts, the others worked at various handicrafts or at agriculture. After the religious services of the morning the Brothers scattered for the day's work, the artisans going to the workshops in the city,—for the idea was to live and work in the world, and not separated from it, like the monks. Their rule was that they had to earn their livelihood, and must not beg. This feature seemed a reflection on the mendicant orders, and the idea of a community life without vows and not in isolation from everyday life, was looked upon as something new and strange, and even as bearing affinities to the Beghards and other sects, at that time causing trouble to both Church and state. And so opposition arose to the Modern Devotion, and the controversy was carried to the legal faculty at Cologne University, which gave a judgment strongly in their favour. The question, for all that, was not finally settled until the council of Constance (1414), when their cause was triumphantly defended by Pierre d'Ailly and Gerson. For a century after this the Modern Devotion flourished exceedingly, and its influence on the revival of religion in the Netherlands and north Germany in the 15th century was wide and deep. It has been the fashion to treat Groot and the Brothers of Common Life as "Reformers before the Reformation"; but Schulze, in the Protestant Realencyklopädie, is surely right in pronouncing this view quite unhistorical—except on the theory that all interior spiritual religion is Protestant: he shows that at the Reformation hardly any of the Brothers embraced Lutheranism, only a single community going over as a body to the new religion. During the second half of the 16th century the institute gradually declined, and by the middle of the 17th all its houses had ceased to exist.

Authorities.—The chief authorities are Thomas à Kempis, Lives of Groot and his Disciples and Chronicle of Mount St Agnes (both works translated by J.P. Arthur, the former under the title Founders of the New Devotion, 1905); Busch, Chronicle of Windesheim (ed. Grube, 1887). Much has been written on the subject in Dutch and German; in English, S. Kettlewell, Thomas à Kempis and the Brothers of Common Life (1882) (but see Arthur in the Prefaces to above-named books); for a shorter sketch, F.R. Cruise, Thomas à Kempis (1887). An excellent article in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (3rd ed.), "Brüder des gemeinsamen Lebens," supplies copious information with references to all the literature; see also Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1897), ii. § 123. The part played by the Brothers of Common Life in the religious and educational movements of the time may be studied in Ludwig Pastor's History of the Popes from the close of the Middle Ages, or J. Janssen's History of the German People.

(E. C. B.)

BROUGH, ROBERT (1872-1905), British painter, was born at Invergordon, Ross-shire. He was educated at Aberdeen, and, whilst apprenticed for over six years as lithographer to Messrs Gibb & Co., attended the night classes at the local art school. He then entered the Royal Scottish Academy, and in the first year took the Stuart prize for figure painting, the Chalmers painting bursary, and the Maclaine-Walters medal for composition. After two years in Paris under J.P. Laurens and Benjamin-Constant at Julian's atelier, he settled in Aberdeen in 1894 as a portrait painter and political cartoonist. A portrait of Mr W.D. Ross first drew attention to his talent in 1896, and in the following year he scored a marked success at the Royal Academy with his "Fantaisie en Folie," now at the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery). Two of his paintings, "'Twixt Sun and Moon" and "Childhood of St Anne of Brittany," are at the Venice municipal gallery. Brough's art is influenced by Raeburn and by modern French training, but it strikes a very personal note. Robert Brough met his death from injuries received in a railway disaster in 1905, his early death being a notable loss to British art.

BROUGHAM, JOHN (1814-1880), British actor, was born at Dublin on the 9th of May 1814, and was educated for a surgeon. Owing to family misfortunes he was thrown upon his own resources and made his first appearance on the London stage in 1830, at the Tottenham Street theatre in Tom and Jerry, in which he played six characters. In 1831 he was a member of Madame Vestris's company, and wrote his first play, a burlesque. He remained with Madame Vestris as long as she and Charles Mathews retained Covent Garden, and he collaborated with Dion Boucicault in writing London Assurance, Dazzle being one of his best parts. In 1840 he managed the Lyceum theatre, for which he wrote several light burlesques, but in 1842 he moved to the United States, where he became a member of W.E. Burton's company, for which he wrote several comedies. Later he was the manager of Niblo's Garden, and in 1850 opened Brougham's Lyceum, which, like his next speculation, the lease of the Bowery theatre, was not financially a success. He was later connected with Wallack's and Daly's theatres, and wrote plays for both. In 1860 he returned to London, where he adapted or wrote several plays, including The Duke's Motto for Fechter. After the Civil War he returned to New York. Brougham's theatre was opened in 1869 with his comedy Better Late than Never, but this managerial experience was also unfortunate, and he took to playing with various stock companies. His last appearance was in 1879 as O'Reilly, the detective, in Boucicault's Rescued, and he died in New York on the 7th of June 1880. Brougham was the author of nearly 100 plays, most of them now forgotten. He was the founder of the Lotus Club in New York, and for a time its president. He also edited there in 1852 a comic paper called The Lantern, and published two collections of miscellaneous writings, A Basket of Chips and The Bunsby Papers. Brougham is said to have been the original of Harry Lorrequer in Charles Lever's novel. He was twice married, in 1838 to Emma Williams (d. 1865), and in 1844 to Mrs Annette Hawley (d. 1870), both actresses.

BROUGHAM, a four-wheeled closed carriage, seating two or more persons, and drawn by a single horse or pair, or propelled by motor. The modern "brougham" has developed and taken its name from the "odd little kind of garden-chair" described by Thomas Moore, which the first Lord Brougham had made by a coachmaker to his own design.

BROUGHAM AND VAUX, HENRY PETER BROUGHAM, 1st Baron (1778-1868), lord chancellor of England, was born at Edinburgh on the 19th of September 1778. He was the eldest son of Henry Brougham and Eleanora, daughter of the Rev. James Syme. In his later years he was wont to trace his paternal descent to Uduardus de Broham, in the reign of Henry II., but no real connexion has been established between the ancient lords of Brougham castle, whose inheritance passed by marriage from the Viponts into the family of the De Cliffords, and the Broughams of Scales Hall, from whom the chancellor was really descended. Entering the high school of Edinburgh when barely seven, he left, having risen to be head of the school, in 1791. He entered the university of Edinburgh in 1792, and devoted himself chiefly to the study of natural science and mathematics, contributing in 1795 a paper to the Royal Society on some new phenomenon of light and colours, which was printed in the Transactions of that body. A paper on porisms was published in the same manner in 1798, and in 1803 his scientific reputation was so far established that he was elected F.R.S., But in spite of his taste for mathematical reasoning, Brougham's mind was not an accurate or exact one; and his pursuit of physical science was rather a favourite recreation than a solid advantage to him.

For two years of his university career he had attended lectures in civil law, and having adopted law as a profession he was admitted to the faculty of advocates in 1800. It does not appear that he ever held a brief in the court of session, but he went a circuit or two, where he defended or prosecuted a few prisoners, and played a series of tricks on the presiding judge, Lord Eskgrove, which almost drove that learned person to distraction. The Scottish bar, however, as he soon perceived, offered no field sufficiently ample for his talents and his ambition. He resolved to go to London, where he had already appeared as junior counsel in a Scottish appeal to the House of Lords. In 1803 he entered at Lincoln's Inn, and in 1808 he was called to the English bar. In the meantime he had turned to literature as a means of subsistence. When in 1802 the Edinburgh Review was founded by the young and aspiring lights of the northern metropolis, Brougham was the most ready, the most versatile and the most satirical of all its contributors. To the first twenty numbers he contributed eighty articles, wandering through every imaginable subject,—science, politics, colonial policy, literature, poetry, surgery, mathematics and the fine arts. The prodigious success of the Review, and the power he was known to wield in it, made him a man of mark from his first arrival in London. He obtained the friendship of Lord Grey and the leading Whig politicians. His wit and gaiety made him an ornament of society, and he sought to extend his literary and political reputation by the publication of an elaborate work on the colonial policy of the empire. In 1806, Fox being then in office, he was appointed secretary to a mission of Lord Rosslyn and Lord St Vincent to the court of Lisbon, with a view to counteract the anticipated French invasion of Portugal. The mission lasted two or three months; Brougham came home out of humour and out of pocket; and meantime the death of Fox put an end to the hopes of the Whigs.

Brougham was disappointed by the abrupt fall of the ministry, and piqued that his Whig friends had not provided him with a seat in parliament. Nevertheless, he exerted his pen with prodigious activity during the election of 1809; and Lord Holland declared that he had filled the booksellers' shops with articles and pamphlets. The result was small. No seat was placed at his disposal, and he was too poor to contest a borough. He was fortunate at this time to ally himself with the movement for the abolition of the slave-trade, and he remained through life not only faithful, but passionately attached to the cause. Indeed, one of the first measures he carried in the House of Commons was a bill to make the slave-trade felony, and he had the happiness, as chancellor of England, to take a part in the final measure of negro emancipation throughout the colonies.

Previous to his entering on practice at the English bar, Brougham had acquired some knowledge of international law, and some experience of the prize courts. This circumstance probably led to his being retained as counsel for the Liverpool merchants who had petitioned both Houses of Parliament against the Orders in Council. Brougham conducted the lengthened inquiry which took place at the bar of the House, and he displayed on this occasion a mastery over the principles of political economy and international law which at that time was rare. Nevertheless, he was unsuccessful, and it was not until 1812, when he was himself in parliament, that he resumed his attack on the Orders in Council, and ultimately conquered. It was considered inexpedient and impossible that a man so gifted, and so popular as Brougham had now become, should remain out of parliament, and by the influence of Lord Holland the duke of Bedford was induced to return him to the House of Commons for the borough of Camelford. He took his seat early in 1810, having made a vow that he would not open his mouth for a month. The vow was kept, but kept for that month only. He spoke in March in condemnation of the conduct of Lord Chatham at Walcheren, and he went on speaking for the rest of his life. In four months, such was the position he had acquired in the House that he was regarded as a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal party, then in the feeble hands of George Ponsonby. However, the Tories continued in power. Parliament was dissolved. Camelford passed into other hands. Brougham was induced to stand for Liverpool, with Thomas Creevey against Canning and General Gascoyne. The Liberals were defeated by a large majority, and what made the sting of defeat more keen was that Creevey retained his old seat for Thetford, while Brougham was left out in the cold.

He remained out of parliament during the four eventful years from 1812 to 1816, which witnessed the termination of the war, and he did not conceal his resentment against the Whigs. But in the years he spent out of parliament occurrences took place which gave ample employment to his bustling activity, and led the way to one of the most important passages of his life. He had been introduced in 1809 to the princess of Wales (afterwards Queen Caroline). But it was not till 1812 that the princess consulted him on her private affairs, after the rupture between the prince regent and the Whigs had become more decided. From that time, Brougham, in conjunction with Samuel Whitbread, became one of the princess's chief advisers; he was attached to her service, not so much from any great liking or respect for herself, as from an indignant sense of the wrongs and insults inflicted upon her by her husband. Brougham strongly opposed her departure from England in 1814, as well as her return in 1820 on the accession of George IV.

In 1816 he had again been returned to parliament for Winchelsea, a borough of the earl of Darlington, and he instantly resumed a commanding position in the House of Commons. He succeeded in defeating the continuance of the income-tax; he distinguished himself as an advocate for the education of the people; and on the death of Romilly he took up with ardour the great work of the reform of the law. Nothing exasperated the Tory party more than the select committee which sat, with Brougham in the chair, in 1816 and the three following years, to investigate the state of education of the poor in the metropolis. But he was as far as ever from obtaining the leadership of the party to which he aspired. Indeed, as was pointed out by Lord Lansdowne in 1817, the opposition had no recognized efficient leaders; their warfare was carried on in separate courses, indulging their own tastes and tempers, without combined action. Nor was Brougham much more successful at the bar. The death of George III. suddenly changed this state of things. Queen Caroline at once, in April 1820, appointed Brougham her attorney-general, and Denman her solicitor-general; and they immediately took their rank in court accordingly; this was indeed the sole act of royal authority on the part of the unhappy queen. In July Queen Caroline came from St Omer to England; ministers sent down to both Houses of Parliament the secret evidence which they had long been collecting against her; and a bill was brought into the House of Lords for the deposition of the queen, and the dissolution of the king's marriage. The defence of the queen was conducted by Brougham, assisted by Denman, Lushington and Wilde, with equal courage and ability. His conduct of the defence was most able, and he wound up the proceedings with a speech of extraordinary power and effect. The peroration was said to have been written and rewritten by him seventeen times. At moments of great excitement such declamation may be of value, and in 1820 it was both heard and read with enthusiasm. But to the calmer judgment of later generations this celebrated oration seems turgid and overstrained. Such immense popular sympathy prevailed on the queen's behalf, that the ministry did not proceed with the bill in the Commons, and the result was a virtual triumph for the queen.

This victory over the court and the ministry raised Henry Brougham at once to the pinnacle of fame. He shared the triumph of the queen. His portrait was in every shop window. A piece of plate was presented to him, paid for by a penny subscription of peasants and mechanics. He refused to accept a sum of £4000 which the queen herself placed at his disposal; he took no more than the usual fees of counsel, while his salary as Her Majesty's attorney-general remained unpaid, until it was discharged by the treasury after her death. But from that moment his fortune was made at the bar. His practice on the northern circuit quintupled. One of his finest speeches was a defence of a Durham newspaper which had attacked the clergy for refusing to allow the bells of churches to be tolled on the queen's death; and by the admission of Lord Campbell, a rival advocate and an unfriendly critic, he rose suddenly to a position unexampled in the profession. The meanness of George IV. and of Lord Eldon refused him the silk gown to which his position at the bar entitled him, and for some years he led the circuit as an outer barrister, to the great loss of the senior members of the circuit, who could only be employed against him. His practice rose to about £7000 a year, but it was again falling off before he became chancellor.

It may here be mentioned that in 1825 the first steps were taken, under the auspices of Brougham, for the establishment of a university in London, absolutely free from all religious or sectarian distinctions. In 1827 he contributed to found the "Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge"—an association which gave an immense impulse to sound popular literature. Its first publication was an essay on the "Pleasures and Advantages of Science" written by himself. In the following year (1828) he delivered his great speech on law reform, which lasted six hours, in a thin and exhausted House,—a marvellous effort, embracing every part of the existing system of judicature.

The death of Canning, the failure of Lord Goderich, and the accession of the duke of Wellington to power, again changed the aspect of affairs. The progress of the movement for parliamentary reform had numbered the days of the Tory government. At the general election of 1830 the county of York spontaneously returned Brougham to the new House of Commons as their representative. The parliament met in November. Brougham's first act was to move for leave to bring in a bill to amend the representation of the people; but before the debate came on the government was defeated on another question; the duke resigned, and Earl Grey was commanded by William IV. to form an administration.

Amongst the difficulties of the new premier and the Whig party were the position and attitude of Brougham. He was not the leader of any party, and had no personal following in the House of Commons. Moreover, he himself had repeatedly declared that nothing would induce him to exchange his position as an independent member of parliament for any office, however great. On the day following the resignation of the Tory government, he reluctantly consented to postpone for one week his motion on parliamentary reform. The attorney-generalship was offered to him and indignantly refused. He himself affirms that he desired to be master of the rolls, which would have left him free to sit in the House of Commons. But this was positively interdicted by the king, and objected to by Lord Althorp, who declared that he could not undertake to lead the House with so insubordinate a follower behind him. But as it was impossible to leave Brougham out of the ministry, it was determined to offer him the chancellorship. Brougham himself hesitated, or affected to hesitate, but finally yielded to the representations of Lord Grey and Lord Althorp. On the 22nd of November the great seal was delivered to him by the king, and he was raised to the peerage as Baron Brougham and Vaux. His chancellorship lasted exactly four years.

Lord Brougham took a most active and prominent part in all the great measures promoted by Grey's government, and the passing of the Reform Bill was due in a great measure to the vigour with which he defended it. But success developed traits which had hitherto been kept in the background. His manner became dictatorial and he exhibited a restless eccentricity, and a passion for interfering with every department of state, which alarmed the king. By his insatiable activity he had contrived to monopolize the authority and popularity of the government, and notwithstanding the immense majority by which it was supported in the reformed parliament, a crisis was not long in arriving. Lord Grey resigned, but very much by Brougham's exertions the cabinet was reconstructed under Lord Melbourne, and he appeared to think that his own influence in it would be increased. But the irritability of his temper and the egotism of his character made it impossible for his colleagues to work with him, and the extreme mental excitement under which he laboured at this time culminated during a journey to Scotland in a behaviour so extravagant, that it gave the final stroke to the confidence of the king. At Lancaster he joined the bar-mess, and spent the night in an orgy. In a country house he lost the great seal, and found it again in a game of blindman's-buff. At Edinburgh, in spite of the coldness which had sprung up between himself and the Grey family, he was present at a banquet given to the late premier, and delivered a harangue on his own services and his public virtue. All this time he continued to correspond with the king in a strain which created the utmost irritation and amazement at Windsor.

Shortly after the meeting of parliament in November the king dismissed his ministers. The chancellor, who had dined at Holland House, called on Lord Melbourne on his way home, and learned the intelligence. Melbourne made him promise that he would keep it a secret until the morrow, but the moment he quitted the ex-premier he sent a paragraph to The Times relating the occurrence, and adding that "the queen had done it all." That statement, which was totally unfounded, was the last act of his official life. The Peel ministry, prematurely and rashly summoned to power, was of no long duration, and Brougham naturally took an active part in overthrowing it. Lord Melbourne was called upon in April 1835 to reconstruct the Whig government with his former colleagues. But, formidable as he might be as an opponent, the Whigs had learned by experience that Brougham was even more dangerous to them as an ally, and with one accord they resolved that he should not hold the great seal or any other office. The great seal was put in commission, to divert for a time his resentment, and leave him, if he chose, to entertain hopes of recovering it. These hopes, however, were soon dissipated; and although the late chancellor assumed an independent position in the House of Lords, and even affected to protect the government, his resentment against his "noble friends" soon broke out with uncontrolled vehemence. Throughout the session of 1835 his activity was undiminished. Bills for every imaginable purpose were thrown by him on the table of the House, and it stands recorded in Hansard that he made no less than 221 reported speeches in parliament in that year. But in the course of the vacation a heavier blow was struck: Lord Cottenham was made lord chancellor. Brougham's daring and arrogant spirit sank for a time under the shock, and during the year 1836 he never spoke in parliament. Among the numerous expedients resorted to in order to keep his name before the public, was a false report of his death by a carriage accident, sent up from Westmorland in 1839. He was accused, with great probability, of being himself the author of the report. Such credence did it obtain that all the newspapers of October 22, excepting The Times, had obituary notices. However, for more than thirty years after his fall he continued to take an active part in the judicial business of the House of Lords, and in its debates; but it would have been better for his reputation if he had died earlier. His reappearance in parliament on the accession of Queen Victoria was marked by sneers at the court, and violent attacks on the Whigs for their loyal and enthusiastic attachment to their young sovereign; and upon the outbreak of the insurrection in Canada, and the miscarriage of Lord Durham's mission, he overwhelmed his former colleagues, and especially Lord Glenelg, with a torrent of invective and sarcasm, equal in point of oratory to the greatest of his earlier speeches. Indeed, without avowedly relinquishing his political principles, Brougham estranged himself from the whole party by which those principles were defended; and his conduct in general during the years following his loss of office revealed his character in a very unfavourable light. He continued, however, to render judicial services in the privy council, and the House of Lords. The privy council, especially when hearing appeals from the colonies, India, and the courts maritime and ecclesiastical was his favourite tribunal; its vast range of jurisdiction, varied by questions of foreign and international law, suited his discursive genius. He had remodelled the judicial committee in 1833, and it still remains one of the most useful of his creations.

In the year 1860 a second patent was conferred upon him by Queen Victoria, with a reversion of his peerage to his youngest brother, William Brougham (d. 1886). The preamble of this patent stated that this unusual mark of honour was conferred upon him by the crown as an acknowledgment of the great services he had rendered, more especially in promoting the abolition of slavery, and the emancipation of the negro race. The peerage was thus perpetuated in a junior branch of the family, Lord Brougham himself being without an heir. He had married in 1821 Mrs Spalding (d. 1865), daughter of Thomas Eden, and had two daughters, the survivor of whom died in 1839. Brougham's last days were passed at Cannes, in the south of France. An accident having attracted his attention to the spot about the year 1838, when it was little more than a fishing village on a picturesque coast, he bought there a tract of land and built on it. His choice and his example made it the sanatorium of Europe. He died there on the 7th of May 1868, in the ninetieth year of his age.

The verdict of the time has proved that there was nothing of permanence, and little of originality in the prodigious efforts of Brougham's genius. He filled the office of chancellor during times burning with excitement, and he himself embodied and expressed the fervour of the times. He affected at first to treat the business of the court of chancery as a light affair, though in truth he had to work hard to master the principles of equity, of which he had no experience. His manner in court was desultory and dictatorial. Sometimes he would crouch in his chair, muffled in his wig and robes, like a man asleep; at other times he would burst into restless activity, writing letters, working problems, interrupting counsel. But upon the whole Brougham was a just and able judge, though few of his decisions are cited as landmarks of the law.

As a parliamentary figure Brougham's personality excited for many years an immense amount of public interest, now somewhat hard to comprehend. His boundless command of language, his animal spirits and social powers, his audacity and well-stored memory enabled him to dominate the situation. His striking and almost grotesque personal appearance, added to the effect of his voice and manner—a tall disjointed frame, with strong bony limbs and hands, that seemed to interpret the power of his address; strange angular motions of the arms; the incessant jerk of his harsh but expressive features; the modulations of his voice, now thundering in the loudest tones of indignation, now subdued to a whisper—all contributed to give him the magical influence such as is excited by a great actor. But his eccentricity rose at times to the verge of insanity; and with all his powers he lacked the moral elevation which inspires confidence and wins respect.

The activity of Lord Brougham's pen was only second to the volubility of his tongue. He carried on a vast and incessant correspondence of incredible extent. For thirty years he contributed largely to the Edinburgh Review, and he continued to write in that journal even after he held the great seal. The best of his writings, entitled "Sketches of the Statesmen of the time of George III.", first appeared in the Review. These were followed by the "Lives of Men of Letters and Science," of the same period. Later in life he edited Paley's Natural Theology; and he published a work on political philosophy, besides innumerable pamphlets and letters to public men on the events of the day. He published an incorrect translation of Demosthenes' De Corona. A novel entitled Albert Lunel was attributed to him. A fragment of the History of England under the House of Lancaster employed his retirement. In 1838 was published an edition of his speeches in four volumes, elaborately corrected by himself. The last of his works was his posthumous Autobiography. Ambitious as he was of literary fame, and jealous of the success of other authors, he has failed to obtain any lasting place in English literature. His style was slovenly, involved and incorrect; and his composition bore marks of haste and carelessness, and nowhere shows any genuine originality of thought. The collected edition of his works and speeches carefully revised by himself (Edinburgh, 1857 and 1872) is the best. His Autobiography is of some value from the original letters with which it is interspersed. But Lord Brougham's memory was so much impaired when he began to write his recollections that no reliance can be placed on his statements, and the work abounds in manifest errors. Nor was his regard for truth at any time unimpeachable, and the accounts which he gave of more than one transaction in which he played a prominent part were found on investigation to be unfounded.

The best modern account of Brougham is J.B. Atlay's, in his Victorian Chancellors (1906); Lord Campbell's, in Lives of the Chancellors, is spiteful, and by an unfriendly though well-informed critic; the Rev. W. Hunt's judicious and careful biography in the D.N.B. is somewhat lacking in colour; Henry Reeve's article in the 9th ed. of the Ency. Brit., which is frequently drawn upon above, now requires a good many corrections in points of fact and perspective, but gives a brilliant picture by an appreciative critic, much "behind the scenes." See also references in the Greville Memoirs and Creevey Papers; S. Walpole, History of England (1890); J.A. Roebuck, History of the Whig Ministry (1852); Lord Holland, Memoirs of the Whig Party (1854); Brougham and his Early Friends: Letters to James Loch, 1798-1809 (3 vols., London, 1908, privately printed).

BROUGHTON, HUGH (1549-1612), English scholar and divine, was born at Owlbury, Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, in 1549. He was educated by Bernard Gilpin at Houghton-le-Spring and at Cambridge, where he became fellow of St John's and then of Christ's, and took orders. Here he laid the foundation of the Hebrew scholarship for which he was afterwards so distinguished. From Cambridge he went to London, where his eloquence gained him many and powerful friends. In 1588 he published his first work, "a little book of great pains," entitled A Concent of Scripture. This work, dealing with biblical chronology and textual criticism, was attacked at both universities, and the author was obliged to defend it in a series of lectures. In 1589 he went to Germany, where he frequently engaged in discussions both with Romanists and with the learned Jews whom he met at Frankfort and elsewhere. In 1591 he returned to England, but his Puritan leanings incurred the hostility of Whitgift. Accordingly in 1592 he once more went abroad, and cultivated the acquaintance of the principal scholars of Europe, including Scaligeri and Rabbi Elias. Such was the esteem in which he was held, even by his opponents, that he might have had a cardinal's hat if he had been willing to change his faith. In 1599 he published his "Explication" of the article "He descended into hell," in which he maintained that Hades means simply the abode of departed spirits, not the place of torment. On the accession of James he returned to England; but not being engaged to co-operate in the new translation of the Bible (though he had for some years planned a similar work), he retired to Middleburg in Holland, where he preached to the English congregation. In 1611 he returned to England, where he died on the 4th of August 1612.

Some of his works were collected and published in a large folio volume in 1662, with a sketch of his life by John Lightfoot, but many of his theological MSS. remain still unedited in the British Museum.

BROUGHTON, JOHN CAM HOBHOUSE, Baron (1786-1869), English writer and politician, was the eldest son of Sir Benjamin Hobhouse, Bart., by his wife Charlotte, daughter of Samuel Cam of Chantry House, Bradford, Wiltshire. Born at Bristol on the 27th of June 1786, he was educated at Westminster school and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1808. He took the Hulsean prize in 1808 for his Essay on the Origin and Intention of Sacrifices. At Cambridge he founded the "Whig Club," and the "Amicable Society," and became very intimate with Byron, who accompanied him on a tour in Spain, Greece and Turkey in 1809. Hobhouse was present at the battle of Dresden in August 1813, and, following the allied army into France, saw Louis XVIII. enter Paris in May 1814. He was again in Paris after the return of Napoleon from Elba, and showed his dislike of the Bourbons and his sympathy with Bonaparte by writing in 1816 a pamphlet entitled The substance of some letters written by an Englishman resident in Paris during the last reign of the emperor Napoleon. This caused some offence in England and more in France, and the French translation was seized by the government and both translator and printer were imprisoned. A further period of travel with Byron followed, and at this time Hobhouse wrote some notes to the fourth canto of Childe Harold. This canto was afterwards dedicated to him, and a revised edition of a part of his notes entitled Historical illustrations of the fourth canto of "Childe Harold" containing dissertations on the ruins of Rome and an essay on Italian literature, was published in 1818. In February 1819 Hobhouse was the Radical candidate at a by-election for the representation of the city of Westminster, but he failed to secure election. He had already gained some popularity by writing in favour of reform, and in 1819 he issued A defence of the People in reply to Lord Erskine's "Two Defences of the Whigs," followed by A trifling mistake in Thomas, Lord Erskine's recent preface. The House of Commons declared this latter pamphlet a breach of privilege; its author was arrested on the 14th of December 1819, and in spite of an appeal to the court of king's bench he remained in custody until the end of the following February. But this proceeding only increased his popularity, and at the general election of 1820 he was returned for Westminster. Hobhouse shared Byron's enthusiasm for the liberation of Greece; after the poet's death in 1824 he proved his will, and superintended the arrangements for his funeral. In parliament he proved a valuable recruit to the party of reform; and having succeeded his father as 2nd baronet in 1831, was appointed secretary at war in the ministry of Earl Grey in February 1832, and was made a privy councillor. He effected some reforms and economies during his tenure of this office, but, unable to carry out all his wishes, became chief secretary for Ireland in March 1833. He had only held this post for a few weeks when, in consequence of his refusal to vote with the government against the abolition of the house and window tax, he resigned both his office and his seat in parliament. At the subsequent election he was defeated, but joined the cabinet as first commissioner of woods and forests when Lord Melbourne took office in July 1834, and about the same time was returned at a by-election as one of the members for Nottingham. In Melbourne's government of 1835 he was president of the board of control, in which position he strongly supported the Indian policy of Lord Auckland; he returned to the same office in July 1846 as a member of Lord John Russell's cabinet; and in February 1851 he went to the House of Lords as Baron Broughton of Broughton Gyfford. He left office when Russell resigned in February 1852, and took little part in political life, being mainly occupied in literary pursuits and in correspondence. He died in London on the 3rd of June 1869.

He had married in July 1828 Lady Julia Tomlinson Hay, daughter of George, 7th marquess of Tweeddale, by whom he had three daughters, but being without heir male the barony lapsed on his death, the baronetcy passing to his nephew, Charles Parry Hobhouse. Lord Broughton was a partner in Whitbread's brewery, a fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society. He was responsible for the passing of the Vestry Act of 1831, and is said to have first used the phrase "his majesty's opposition." He was a good classical scholar, and although not eloquent, an able debater. In addition to the works already enumerated he wrote A journey through Albania and other provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the years 1809 and 1810 (London, 1813), revised edition (London, 1855); and Italy: Remarks made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854 (London, 1859). A collection of his diaries, correspondence and memoranda is in the British Museum.

See T. Moore, Life of Lord Byron (London, 1837-1840); Greville Memoirs (London, 1896); Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xxvii. (London, 1891); The Times, June 4, 1869; Spencer Walpole, History of England (London, 1890). Broughton also wrote Recollections of a Long Life, printed privately in 1865, and in 1909 published with additions in 2 vols. edited by his daughter, Lady Dorchester, with a preface by the earl of Rosebery.

BROUGHTY FERRY, a municipal and police burgh, seaport and watering-place of Forfarshire, Scotland, on the Firth of Tay, 4 m. E. of Dundee by the North British railway. Pop. (1901) 10,484. The name is a corruption of Brugh or Burgh Tay, in allusion to the fortress standing on the rock that juts into the Firth. It is believed that a stronghold has occupied this site since Pictish times. The later castle, built in 1498, fell into the hands of the English in 1547 and was held by them for three years. Gradually growing more or less ruinous it was acquired by government in 1855, repaired, strengthened and converted into a Tay defence, mounting several heavy guns. Owing to its healthy and convenient situation, Broughty Ferry has become a favourite residence of Dundee merchants. Fishery and shipping are carried on to a limited extent. Before the erection of the Tay Bridge the town was the scene of much traffic, as the railway ferry from Tayport was then the customary access to Dundee from the south. Monifieth (pop. 2134), 2¼ m. north-east of Broughty Ferry, with a station on the North British railway, is noted for its golf links. About 2 m. north rises the conical hill of Laws (400 ft. high), on the top of which are the remains of a vitrified fort, 390 ft. long by 198 ft. in breadth.

BROUSSAIS, FRANÇOIS JOSEPH VICTOR (1772-1838), French physician, was born at St Malo on the 17th of December 1772. From his father, who was also a physician, he received his first instructions in medicine, and he studied for some years at the college of Dinan. At the age of seventeen he entered one of the newly-formed republican regiments, but ill-health compelled him to withdraw after two years. He resumed his medical studies, and then obtained an appointment as surgeon in the navy. In 1799 he proceeded to Paris, wherein 1803 he graduated as M.D. In 1805 he again joined the army in a professional capacity, and served in Germany and Holland. Returning to Paris in 1808 he published his Histoire des phlegmasies ou inflammations chroniques; then left again for active service in Spain. In 1814 he returned to Paris, and was appointed assistant-professor to the military hospital of the Val-de-Grace, where he first promulgated his peculiar doctrines on the relation between "life" and "stimulus," and on the physiological interdependence and sympathies of the various organs. His lectures were attended by great numbers of students, who received with the utmost enthusiasm the new theories which he propounded. In 1816 he published his Examen de la doctrine médicale généralement adoptée, which drew down upon its author the hatred of the whole medical faculty of Paris; but by degrees his doctrines triumphed, and in 1831 he was appointed professor of general pathology in the academy of medicine. In 1828 he published a work De l'irritation et de la folie, and towards the end of his life he attracted large audiences by his lectures on phrenology. He died at Vitry-sur-Seine on the 17th of November 1838.

BROUSSONET, PIERRE MARIE AUGUSTE (1761-1807), French naturalist, was born at Montpellier on the 28th of February 1761, and was educated for the medical profession. Visiting England, he was admitted in 1872 an honorary member of the Royal Society, and in the same year published at London the first part of his work on fishes, Ichthyologiae Decas I, material for which was communicated to him by Sir Joseph Banks. On his return to Paris he was appointed perpetual secretary to the Society of Agriculture, and in 1789 became a member of the National Assembly. Under the convention he had to leave Paris, and after some dangers he made his way to Madrid. The enmity of the French emigrants, however, drove him from Spain, and afterwards from Lisbon, but at last he found a refuge in Morocco as physician to an embassy sent out by the United States. Later he obtained permission from the Directory to return to France, and in 1805 was appointed professor of botany at Montpellier, where he died on the 17th of January 1807.

BROUWER, or Brauwer, ADRIAN (1608-1640), Dutch painter, was born at Haarlem, of very humble parents, who bound him apprentice to the painter Frans Hals. Brouwer had an admirable eye for colour, and much spirit in design; and these gifts his master appears to have turned to his own profit, while his pupil was half starved. As the result of this ungenerous treatment, Brouwer was frequently brought into low company and dissipated scenes, which he delineated with great spirit and vivid colouring in his pictures. The unfortunate artist died in a hospital at Antwerp at the early age of thirty-two, consequently his works are few and rarely met with. The largest collection of his masterpieces is in the Pinakothek at Munich.

BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN (1771-1810), American novelist, was born of Quaker parents in Philadelphia, on the 17th of January 1771. Of delicate constitution and retiring habits, he early devoted himself to study; his principal amusement was the invention of ideal architectural designs, devised on the most extensive and elaborate scale. This characteristic talent for construction subsequently assumed the shape of Utopian projects for perfect commonwealths, and at a later period of a series of novels distinguished by the ingenuity and consistent evolution of the plot. The transition between these intellectual phases is marked by a juvenile romance entitled Carsol, not published until after the author's death, which professes to depict an imaginary community, and shows how thoroughly the young American was inspired by Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose principal writings had recently made their appearance. From the latter he derived the idea of his next work, The Dialogue of Alcuin (1797), an enthusiastic but inexperienced essay on the question of woman's rights and liberties. From Godwin he learned his terse style, condensed to a fault, but too laconic for eloquence or modulation, and the art of developing a plot from a single psychological problem or mysterious circumstance. The novels which he now rapidly produced offer the strongest affinity to Caleb Williams, and if inferior to that remarkable work in subtlety of mental analysis, greatly surpass it in affluence of invention and intensity of poetical feeling. All are wild and weird in conception, with incidents bordering on the preternatural, yet the limit of possibility is never transgressed. In Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), the first and most striking, a seemingly inexplicable mystery is resolved into a case of ventriloquism. Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1798-1800), is remarkable for the description of the epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Edgar Huntly (Philadelphia, 1801), a romance rich in local colouring, is remarkable for the effective use made of somnambulism, and anticipates Cooper's introduction of the American Indian into fiction. Ormond (1799) is less powerful, but contains one character, Constantia Dudley, which excited the enthusiastic admiration of Shelley. Two subsequent novels, Clara Howard (1801) and Jane Talbot (1804), dealing with ordinary life, proved failures, and Brown betook himself to compiling a general system of geography, editing a periodical, and an annual register, and writing political pamphlets. He died of consumption on the 22nd of February 1810. He is depicted by his biographer as the purest and most amiable of men, and in spite of a certain formality, due perhaps to his Quaker education, the statement is borne out by his correspondence.

The life of Charles Brockden Brown was written by his friend William Dunlap (Philadelphia, 1815). See also William H. Prescott, Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (New York, 1845). His works in 6 vols. were published at Philadelphia in 1857 with a "life," and in a limited and more elaborate edition (1887).

BROWN, FORD MADOX (1821-1893), English painter, was born at Calais on the 16th of April 1821. His father was Ford Brown, a retired purser in the navy; his mother, Caroline Madox, of an old Kentish family. His paternal grandfather was Dr John Brown, who established the Brunonian Theory of Medicine. Ford Madox Brown was the only child of his parents, save for a daughter who died young. In childhood he was shifted about a good deal between France and England; and having shown from the age of six or seven a turn for drawing he was taken, when fourteen years old, and with meagre acquirements in the way of general tuition, to Bruges, and placed under the instruction of Gregorius, a pupil of David. His principal instructor, however, from about 1837, was Baron Wappers, of Antwerp, then regarded as a great light of the Belgian school. From him the youth learned the technique not only of oil painting but of various other branches of art. At a very early age Brown attained a remarkable degree of force in drawing and painting, as attested by an extant oil-portrait of his father, done at an age not exceeding fifteen. His first composition, towards 1836, represented a blind beggar and his child; his first exhibited work, 1837, was "Job on the Ash-heap"; the first exhibited work in London (at the Royal Academy, 1840), "The Giaour's Confession," from Byron's poem. Both his parents died before 1840, leaving to the young painter a moderate competence, which soon was materially reduced. In 1840 Brown completed a large picture, "The Execution of Mary, queen of Scots," strong in dramatic effect and in handling, with rather sombre colour; from this time forth he must be regarded as a proficient artist, independent in his point of view and strenuous in execution. He contributed to the cartoon competitions, 1844 and 1845, for the Houses of Parliament—"Adam and Eve after the Fall," "The Body of Harold brought to William the Conqueror," and "The Spirit of Justice." These highly remarkable cartoons passed not wholly unobserved, but not one of them obtained a prize. The years 1840 to 1845 were passed in Paris, London and Rome: towards the middle of 1846 Brown settled permanently in London. In 1841 he had married his cousin Elizabeth Bromley, who died of consumption in 1846, leaving a daughter, Lucy, who in 1874 became the wife of William M. Rossetti. Not long after being left a widower, Brown took a second wife, Emma Hill, who figures in many of his pictures. She had two children who grew up: Catherine, who married Dr Franz Hueffer, the musical scholar and critic, and Oliver, who died in 1874 in his twentieth year. All three children showed considerable ability in painting, and Oliver in romance as well. The second Mrs Brown died in 1890.

The most marked distinction of Brown as an artist may be defined as vigorous invention of historic or dramatic scenes, carried out with a great regard to individuality in the personages, expressions and accessories of incident and detail, not excluding the familiar, the peculiar and the semi-grotesque, when these seem to subserve the general intent. Owing, however, to his association with artists of the so-called "pre-Raphaelite" movement (which began late in 1848), and especially with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who received some training in his studio in the spring of that year, he has been regarded sometimes as the precursor or initiator of this movement, and sometimes as a direct co-operator in it. His claim to be regarded as a precursor or initiator is not strong; though it is true that even before 1841 he had pondered the theory (not then much in vogue) that a picture ought to present the veritable light and shade proper to some one moment in the day, and his "Manfred on the Jungfrau" (1841) exemplifies this principle to some extent; it reappears in his very large picture of "Chaucer at the Court of Edward III." (now in the public gallery of Sydney, Australia), which, although projected in 1845, was not brought to completion until 1851. As to becoming a direct co-operator in the pre-Raphaelite movement, he did not join the "Brotherhood," though it would have been open to him to do so; but for some years his works exhibited a marked influence derived from the movement, not on the whole to their clear advantage. The principal pictures of this class are: "The Pretty Baa-lambs"; "Work" (a street scene at Hampstead); and "The Last of England" (an emigration subject, one of his most excellent achievements): dating between 1851 and 1863. "Christ Washing Peter's Feet" (now in the National Gallery of British Art) comes within the same range of dates, and is a masterly work; here the pre-Raphaelite influence is less manifest. Altogether it may be averred that the conception and introduction of the pre-Raphaelite scheme, such as it appeared to the public eye in 1849 and 1850, belong to Millais, Holman Hunt and Rossetti, rather than to Brown.

Other leading pictures by Brown are the following:—"Cordelia at the Bedside of Lear"; "Shakespeare"; "Jacob and Joseph's Coat"; "Elijah and the Widow's Son"; "Cordelia's Portion"; "The Entombment"; "Romeo and Juliet" (the parting on the balcony); "Don Juan and Haidee"; "Cromwell on his Farm"; "Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois":—covering the period from 1849 to 1877. "Sardanapalus and Myrrha," begun within the same period, was finished later. He produced, moreover, a great number of excellent cartoons for stained glass, being up to 1874 a member of the firm of decorative art, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. He also executed, in colours or in crayons, various portraits, including his own. From 1878 he was almost engrossed by work which he undertook for the town hall of Manchester, and which entailed his living for some few years in that city—twelve large wall paintings, some of them done in a modified form of the Gambier-Parry process, and others in oils on canvas applied to the wall surface. They present a compendium of the history of Manchester and its district, from the building of the Roman camp at Mancunium to the experimental work of Dalton in elaborating the atomic theory. This is an extremely fine series, though with some diversity of individual merit in the paintings, and is certainly the chief representative, in the United Kingdom, of any such form of artistic effort—if we leave out of count the works (by various painters) in the Houses of Parliament.

Madox Brown was never a popular or highly remunerated artist. Up to near middle age he went through trying straits in money matters; afterwards his circumstances improved, but he was not really well off at any time. In youth he followed the usual course as an exhibiting painter, but after some mortifications and heart-burnings he did little in this way after 1852. He held, however, in 1865, an exhibition of his own then numerous paintings and designs. He also delivered a few lectures on fine art from time to time. From 1868 he suffered from gout; and this led to an attack of apoplexy, from which he died in London on the 6th of October 1893. He was a man of upright, independent and honourable character, of warm affections, a steady and self-sacrificing friend; but he took offence rather readily, and viewed various persons and institutions with a degree of suspicion which may be pronounced excessive. He felt interest in many questions outside the range of his art, and, being a good and varied talker, had often something apposite and suggestive to say about them. On more than one occasion he exerted himself very zealously for the benefit of the working classes. In politics he was a consistent Democrat, and on religious questions an Agnostic.

The life of this artist has been well written by his grandson, Ford M. Hueffer, in a handsomely illustrated volume entitled Ford Madox Brown (London, 1896). This volume contains some extracts from Brown's diary, extending in the whole from 1847 to 1865; and other lengthier extracts appear in two books edited by William M. Rossetti—Ruskin, Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism (1899), and Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters (1899). See also the Preferences in Art, &c., by Harry Quilter (1892), and a pamphlet, Ford Madox Brown (1901), by Helen Rossetti (Angeli), applicable to a collection of his works exhibited in the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

(W. M. R.)

BROWN, FRANCIS (1849- ), American Semitic scholar, was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the 26th of December 1849, the son of Samuel Gilman Brown (1813-1885), president of Hamilton College from 1867 to 1881, and the grandson of Francis Brown (1784-1820), whose removal from the presidency of Dartmouth College and later restoration were incidental to the famous "Dartmouth College case." The younger Francis graduated from Dartmouth in 1870 and from the Union Theological Seminary in 1877, and then studied in Berlin. In 1879 he became instructor in biblical philology at the Union Theological Seminary, in 1881 an associate professor of the same subject, and in 1890 professor of Hebrew and cognate languages. Dr Brown's published works have won him honorary degrees from the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, as well as from Dartmouth and Yale; they are, with the exception of The Christian Point of View (1902; with Profs. A. C. McGiffert and G. W. Knox), almost purely linguistic and lexical, and include Assyriology: its Use and Abuse in Old Testament Study (1885), and the important revision of Gesenius, undertaken with S. R. Driver and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1891-1905).

In 1908 he succeeded Charles Cuthbert Hall (1852-1908) as president of the seminary.

BROWN, SIR GEORGE (1790-1865), British soldier, was born and educated in Elgin, Scotland. He obtained a commission in the 43rd (now 1st Bn. Oxfordshire) Light Infantry in 1806, was promoted lieutenant a few months later, and saw active service for the first time in the Mediterranean and at Copenhagen, 1806 and 1807. The 43rd was one of the earliest arrivals in Spain when the Peninsular War broke out, and Brown was with his regiment at Vimeiro, and in the Corunna retreat. Later in 1809 the famous Light Division was formed, and with Craufurd he was present at all the actions of 1810-1811, being severely wounded at Talavera; he was then promoted captain and attended the Staff College at Great Marlow until (late in 1812) he returned to the Peninsula as a captain in the 85th. With this regiment he served under Major-General Lord Aylmer at the Nivelle and Nive, his conduct winning for him the rank of major. The 85th was next employed under General Robert Ross in America, and Brown, who received a severe wound at the action of Bladensburg, was promoted to a lieut.-colonelcy. At the age of twenty-five, with a brilliant war record, he received an appointment at the Horse Guards, and remained in London for over twenty-five years in various staff positions. He was made a colonel and K.H. in 1831, and by 1852 had arrived at the rank of lieut.-general and the dignity of K.C.B. At this time he was adjutant-general, but on the appointment of Lord Hardinge to the post of commander-in-chief, Brown left the Horse Guards. In 1854, on the despatch of a British force to the East, Sir George Brown was appointed to command the Light Division. This he led in action, and administered in camp, on Peninsular principles, and, whilst preserving the strictest discipline to a degree which came in for criticism, he made himself beloved by his men. At Alma he had a horse shot under him. At Inkerman he was wounded whilst leading the French Zouaves into action. In the following year, when an expedition against Kertch and the Russian communications was decided upon, Brown went in command of the British contingent. He was invalided home on the day of Lord Raglan's death. From March 1860 to March 1865 he was commander-in-chief in Ireland. At the time of his death in 1865 he was general and G.C.B., colonel of the 32nd Regiment and colonel-in-chief of the Rifle Brigade.

BROWN, GEORGE (1818-1880), Canadian journalist and statesman, was born in Edinburgh on the 29th of November 1818, and was educated in his native city. With his father, Peter Brown (d. 1863), he emigrated to New York in 1838; and in 1843 they removed to Toronto, and began the publication of The Banner, a politico-religious paper in support of the newly formed Free Church of Scotland. In 1844 he began, independently of his father, the issue of the Toronto Globe. This paper, at first weekly, became in 1853 a daily, and through the ability and energy of Brown, came to possess an almost tyrannical influence over the political opinion of Ontario. In 1851 he entered the Canadian parliament as member for Kent county. Though giving at first a modified support to the Reform government, he soon broke with it and became leader of the Radical or "Clear Grit" party. His attacks upon the Roman Catholic church and on the supposed domination in parliament of the French Canadian section made him very unpopular in Lower Canada, but in Upper Canada his power was great. Largely owing to his attacks, the Clergy Reserves were secularized in 1854. He championed the complete laicization of the schools in Ontario, but unsuccessfully, the Roman Catholic church maintaining its right to separate schools. He also fought for the representation by population of the two provinces in parliament, the Act of Union (1841) having granted an equal number of representatives to each. This principle of "Rep. by Pop." was conceded by the British North America Act (1867). In 1858 Brown became premier of "The Short Administration," which was defeated and compelled to resign after an existence of two days.

He was one of the earliest advocates of a federation of the British colonies in North America, and in 1864, to accomplish this end, entered into a coalition with his bitter personal and political opponent, Mr (afterwards Sir) John A. Macdonald. Largely owing to Brown's efforts, Federation was carried through the House, but on the 21st of December 1865 he resigned from the Coalition government, though continuing to support its Federation policy, and in 1867 he was defeated in South Ontario and never again sat in the House. In great measure owing to his energy, and in spite of much concealed opposition from the French-Canadians, the North-West Territories were purchased by the new Dominion. In December 1873 he was called to the Canadian senate, and in 1874 was appointed by the imperial government joint plenipotentiary with Sir Edward Thornton to negotiate a reciprocity treaty between Canada and the United States. The negotiations were successful, but the draft treaty failed to pass the United States Senate. Soon afterwards Brown refused the lieutenant-governorship of Ontario, and on two subsequent occasions the offer of knighthood, devoting himself to the Globe and to a model farm at Bow Park near Brantford. On the 25th of March 1880 he was shot by a discharged employé, and died on the 9th of May.

His candour, enthusiasm and open tolerance of the opinions of others made him many warm friends and many fierce enemies. He was at his best in his generous protests against all privileges, social, political and religious, and in the self-sacrificing patriotism which enabled him to fling aside his personal prejudices, and so to make Federation possible.

See J. C. Dent, Canadian Portrait Gallery (Toronto, 1800). The official Life, by the Hon. Alexander Mackenzie, is decidedly partisan. A life by John Lewis is included in the Makers of Canada series (Toronto).

(W. L. G.)

BROWN, HENRY KIRKE (1814-1886), American sculptor, was born in Leyden, Massachusetts, on the 24th of February 1814. He began to paint portraits while quite a boy, studied painting in Boston under Chester Harding, learned a little about modelling, and in 1836-1839 spent his summers working as a railroad engineer to earn enough to enable him to study further. He spent four years (1842-1846) in Italy; but returning to New York he remained distinctively American, and was never dominated, as were so many of the early American sculptors, by Italian influence. He died on the 10th of July 1886 at Newburgh, New York. His equestrian statues are excellent, notably that of General Winfield Scott (1874) in Washington, D.C., and one of George Washington (1856) in Union Square, New York City, which was the second equestrian statue made in the United States, following by three years that of Andrew Jackson in Washington by Clark Mills (1815-1883). Brown was one of the first in America to cast his own bronzes. Among his other works are: Abraham Lincoln (Union Square, New York City); Nathanael Greene, George Clinton, Philip Kearny, and Richard Stockton (all in the National Statuary Hall, Capitol, Washington, D.C.); De Witt Clinton and "The Angel of the Resurrection," both in Greenwood cemetery, New York City; and an "Aboriginal Hunter."

His nephew and pupil, Henry Kirke Bush-Brown (b. 1857), also became prominent among American sculptors, his "Buffalo Hunt," equestrian statues of Generals Meade and Reynolds at Gettysburg, and "Justinian" in the New York appellate court-house, being his chief works.

BROWN, JACOB (1775-1828), American soldier, was born of Quaker ancestry, in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, on the 9th of May 1775. From 1796 to 1798 he was engaged in surveying public lands in Ohio; in 1798 he settled in New York City, and during the period (1798-1800) when war with France seemed imminent he acted as military secretary to Alexander Hamilton, then inspector-general of the United States army. Subsequently he purchased a large tract of land in Jefferson county, New York, where he founded the town of Brownville. There he served as county judge, and attained the rank (1810) of brigadier-general in the state militia. On the outbreak of the second war with Great Britain (1812) he was placed in command of the New York state frontier from Oswego to Lake St Francis (near Cornwall, Ontario) and repelled the British attacks on Ogdensburg (October 4, 1812) and Sackett's Harbor (May 29, 1813). In July 1813 he was commissioned brigadier-general in the regular army, and in January 1814 he was promoted major-general and succeeded General James Wilkinson in command of the forces at Niagara. Early in the summer of 1814 he undertook offensive operations, and his forces occupied Fort Erie, and, on the 5th of July, at Chippawa, Ontario, defeated the British under General Phineas Riall (c. 1769-1851). On the 25th of July, with General Winfield Scott, he fought a hotly contested, but indecisive, battle with the British under General Gordon Drummond (1771-1854) at Lundy's Lane, where he was twice wounded. After the war he remained in the army, of which he was the commanding general from March 1821 until his death at Washington, D.C., on the 24th of February 1828.

BROWN, JOHN (1715-1766), British divine and author, was born at Rothbury, Northumberland, on the 5th of November 1715. His father, a descendant of the Browns of Coalston, near Haddington, became vicar of Wigton in that year. Young Brown was educated at St John's College, Cambridge; and after graduating at the head of the list of wranglers in 1735, he took holy orders, and was appointed minor canon and lecturer at Carlisle. In 1745 he distinguished himself in the defence of Carlisle as a volunteer, and in 1747 was appointed chaplain to Dr Osbaldiston, on his admission to the bishopric of Carlisle. His poem, entitled "Honour" (1743), was followed by the "Essay on Satire." This gained for him the friendship of William Warburton, who introduced him to Ralph Allen, of Prior Park, near Bath. In 1751 Brown dedicated to Allen his Essay on the Characteristics of Lord Shaftesbury, containing an able defence of the utilitarian philosophy, praised later by John Stuart Mill (Westminster Review, vol. xxix. p. 477). In 1756 he was promoted by the earl of Hardwicke to the living of Great Horkesley in Essex, and in the following year he took the degree of D.D. at Cambridge. He was the author of two plays, Barbarossa (1754) and Athelstane (1756); Garrick played in both, and the first was a success. The most popular of his works was the Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., 1757-1758), a bitter satire which pleased a public depressed by the ill-success in the conduct of the war, and ready to welcome an attack on luxury and kindred evils. Other works are the Additional Dialogue of the Dead between Pericles and Cosmo ... (1760), in vindication of Chatham's policy; and the Dissertation on the Rise, Union and Power, &c., of Poetry and Music (1763). He was consulted in connexion with a scheme of education which Catherine II. of Russia desired to introduce into her dominions. A memorandum on the subject by Dr Brown led to an offer on her part to entertain him at St Petersburg as her adviser on the subject. He had bought a postchaise and various other things for the journey, when he was persuaded to relinquish the design on account of his gout. He had been subject to fits of melancholy, and, influenced perhaps by disappointment, he committed suicide on the 23rd of September 1766.

There is a detailed account of John Brown by Andrew Kippis in Biographia Britannica (1780), containing the text of the negotiations for his journey to Russia, and of a long letter in which he outlines the principles of the scheme he would have proposed. See also T. Davies, Memoirs of ... David Garrick (1780), chap. xix.

BROWN, JOHN (1722-1787), Scottish divine, was born at Carpow, in Perthshire. He was almost entirely self-educated, having acquired a knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew while employed as a shepherd. His early career was varied, and he was in succession a packman, a soldier in the Edinburgh garrison in 1745, and a school-master. He was, from 1750 till his death, minister of the Burgher branch of the Secession church (see United Presbyterian Church) in Haddington. From 1786 he was professor of divinity for his denomination, and was mainly responsible for the training of its ministry. He gained a just reputation for learning and piety. The best of his many works are his Self-Interpreting Bible and Dictionary of the Bible, works that were long very popular. The former was translated into Welsh. He also wrote an Explication of the Westminster Confession, and a number of biographical and historical sketches.

BROWN, JOHN (1735-1788), Scottish physician, was born in 1735 at Lintlaws or at Preston, Berwickshire. After attending the parish school at Duns, he went to Edinburgh and entered the divinity classes at the university, supporting himself by private tuition. In 1759 he seems to have discontinued his theological studies, and to have begun the study of medicine. He soon attracted the notice of William Cullen, who engaged him as private tutor to his family, and treated him in some respects as an assistant professor. In time, however, he quarrelled with Cullen, as with the professors of the university in general, and from about 1778 his public lectures contained vigorous attacks on all preceding systems of medicine and Cullen's in particular. In 1780 he published his Elementa Medicinae, expounding his own, or as it was then called the Brunonian, theory of medicine, which for a time had a great vogue. In 1786 he set out for London in the vain hope of bettering his fortunes, and died there of apoplexy on the 17th of October 1788.

An edition of his works, with notice of his life by his son, William Cullen Brown, appeared in 1804.

BROWN, JOHN (1784-1858), Scottish divine, grandson of the last-named, was born at Whitburn, Linlithgowshire, on the 12th of July 1784. He studied at Glasgow university, and afterwards at the divinity hall of the "Burgher" branch of the "Secession" church at Selkirk, under the celebrated George Lawson. In 1806 he was ordained minister of the Burgher congregation at Biggar, Lanarkshire, where he laboured for sixteen years. While there he had an interesting controversy with Robert Owen the socialist. Transferred in 1822 to the charge of Rose Street church, Edinburgh, he at once took a high rank as a preacher. In 1829 he succeeded James Hall at Broughton Place church, Edinburgh. In 1835 he was appointed one of the professors in the theological hall of the Secession church, and, great as was his ability as a preacher and pastor, it was probably in this sphere that he rendered his most valuable service. He had been the first in Scotland to use in the pulpit the exegetical method of exposition of Scripture, and as a professor he illustrated the method and extended its use. To him chiefly is due the abandonment of the principle of interpretation according to the "analogy of faith," which practically subordinated the Bible to the creed. Brown's exegesis was marked by rare critical sagacity, exact and extensive scholarship, unswerving honesty, and a clear, logical style; and his expository works have thus a permanent value. He had a considerable share in the Apocrypha controversy, and he was throughout life a vigorous and consistent upholder of anti-state-church or "voluntary" views. His two sermons on The Law of Christ respecting civil obedience, especially in the payment of tribute, called forth by a local grievance from which he had personally suffered, were afterwards published with extensive additions and notes, and are still regarded as an admirable statement and defence of the voluntary principle. The part he took in the discussion on the Atonement, which agitated all the Scottish churches, led to a formal charge of heresy against him by those who held the doctrine of a limited atonement. In 1845, after a protracted trial, he was acquitted by the synod. From that time he enjoyed the thorough confidence of his denomination (after 1847 merged in "the United Presbyterian church"), of which in his later years he was generally regarded as the leading representative. He died on the 13th of October 1858. His chief works were: Expository Discourses on First Peter (1848); Exposition of the Discourses and Sayings of our Lord (1850); Exposition of our Lord's Intercessory Prayer (1850); The Resurrection of Life (1851); Expository Discourses on Galatians (1853); and Analytical Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (1857).

See Memoir of John Brown, D.D., by John Cairns (1860).

BROWN, JOHN (1800-1859), American abolitionist, leader of the famous attack upon Harper's Ferry, in 1859, was born on the 9th of May 1800, at Torrington, Connecticut. He is said to have been descended from Peter Brown, who went to America in the Mayflower, and he was the grandson of Captain John Brown, who served in the War of Independence. He was taken by his father, Owen Brown, to Hudson, Ohio, in 1805. At the age of eighteen he began to prepare himself for the Congregational ministry, but soon changed his mind and turned his attention to land surveying. He engaged successively in the tanning business, in sheep-raising, and in the wool trade, but met with little success and in 1842, at Akron, Ohio, became bankrupt. In 1849, after having lived in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, he removed to North Elba, N.Y., where he engaged in farming on part of the land which was being given in small tracts, by its owner Gerrit Smith, to negro settlers. Long before this he had conceived a strong hatred for the institution of slavery, and had determined to do what he could to bring about its destruction. In 1854 five of his sons removed to Kansas, where the violent conflict was beginning between the "free-state" and the pro-slavery settlers, and in the following year Brown, leaving the rest of his family at North Elba, joined them, settling near Osawatomie and immediately becoming a conspicuous figure in the border warfare. His name became particularly well known in connexion with the so-called "Pottawatomie massacre," the killing in cold blood, on the 25th of May 1856, by men under his orders, of five pro-slavery settlers in retaliation for the murder a short time previously of five "free-state" settlers. He also on the 2nd of June, at the head of about thirty men, captured Captain H. C. Pate and twenty-two pro-slavery men at Black Jack, and on the 30th of August 1856, with a small body of supporters, vigorously resisted an attack of a superior pro-slavery force upon Osawatomie. Brown then visited the Eastern states for the purpose of raising money to be used in the Kansas struggle and of arousing the people against slavery. After spending a short time in Kansas, in 1858-1859 he proceeded to carry out a long-cherished scheme for facilitating the escape of fugitive slaves by establishing in the mountains of Virginia a stronghold in which such fugitives could take refuge and defend themselves against their pursuers. At Chatham, Canada, with eleven white and thirty-five negro associates, he adopted a "Provisional Constitution and Ordinance for the People of the United States." Brown was elected commander-in-chief, and from among this group a secretary of state, a secretary of war, a secretary of the treasury, and members of Congress were chosen. Later, with only twenty-two men supplied with arms furnished by the Massachusetts-Kansas committee, and with funds contributed (in ignorance of Brown's plans) by his intimate associates, Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, T. W. Higginson, and F. B. Sanborn, all of Boston, and Gerrit Smith, of Peterboro, New York, he removed to a farm near Harper's Ferry, the site of a Federal arsenal, which he intended to capture as a preliminary to the carrying out of the main part of his plan. On the night of the 16th of October 1859, with only eighteen men, five of whom were negroes, he made the attack, easily capturing the arsenal and taking about sixty of the leading citizens prisoners to be used as hostages. On the following morning Brown and his followers were vigorously attacked, and on the 18th—a small force of United States marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee having arrived—were overpowered, Brown being seriously wounded after he had surrendered. Of the twenty-two men who had participated in the raid, ten were killed, seven were taken prisoners, and five escaped. On the other side five were killed and nine wounded. Brown was committed to the Charlestown, Virginia (now West Virginia), gaol on the 19th of October; on the 27th his trial began; on the 31st he was convicted of "treason, and conspiring and advising with slaves and other rebels, and murder in the first degree"; and on the 2nd of December he was hanged at Charlestown. His fellow-prisoners were likewise hanged soon afterwards. Brown was buried at North Elba, New York. The attack upon Harper's Ferry created widespread excitement, particularly in the Southern states; and among the abolitionists in the North Brown was looked upon as a martyr to their cause. Shortly after his death a famous popular song became widely current in the North, beginning:—

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

But his soul goes marching on.

Intensely religious in his nature, Brown possessed something of the gloomy fanaticism of his Puritan ancestors. The secret of his whole career lies in his emphatic conviction, to use the words of Wendell Phillips, that he had "letters of marque from God"; that he had a divine commission to destroy slavery by violent means. He scouted the "milk and water principles" of the milder abolitionists, advocated vigorous resistance to the slave power, and expressed his ideas by actions rather than by words. It now seems that this policy aided very little in making Kansas a free state, and that the attack on Harper's Ferry, while creating much feeling at the moment, had very little effect on the subsequent course of events. It is safe to assume that secession and civil war would have followed the election of Lincoln if there had been no such raid into Virginia.

Brown was twice married and was the father of twenty children, eight of whom died in early childhood. His sons aided him in all his undertakings, two of them being killed at Harper's Ferry; and Owen Brown, who died in 1889, was long the only survivor of the attack.

See the life (1910) by O. G. Villard, and F. B. Sanborn's Life and Letters of John Brown (Boston, 1885); R. J. Hinton's John Brown and His Men (New York, 1894); James Redpath's Public Life of Captain John Brown (Boston, 1860); Von Hoist's essay, John Brown (Boston, 1889); and J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1890-1906).

BROWN, JOHN (1810-1882), Scottish physician and author, son of John Brown (1784-1858), was born at Biggar, Scotland, on the 22nd of September 1810. He graduated as M.D. at the university of Edinburgh in 1833, and practised as a physician in that city. His reputation, however, is based on the two volumes of essays, Horae Subsecivae (i.e. "leisure hours") (1858, 1861), John Leech and other Papers (1882), Rab and His Friends (1859), and Marjorie Fleming: a Sketch (1863). The first volume of Horae Subsecivae deals chiefly with the equipment and duties of a physician, the second with subjects outside his profession. He was emphatic in his belief that an author should publish nothing "unless he has something to say, and has done his best to say it aright." Acting on this principle, he published little himself, and only after subjecting it to the severest criticism. His work is invariably characterized by humour and tenderness. He suffered during the latter years of his life from pronounced attacks of melancholy, and died on the 11th of May 1882.

See also E. T. McLaren, Dr John Brown and his Sister Isabella (4th ed., 1890); and Letters of Dr John Brown, edited by his son and D. W. Forrest, with biography by E. T. McLaren (1907).

BROWN, SIR JOHN (1816-1896), English armour plate manufacturer, was born at Sheffield on the 6th of December 1816, the son of a slater. He was apprenticed when fourteen years old to a Sheffield firm who manufactured files and table cutlery. Impressed with Brown's ability, the senior partner offered him the control of the business (Earl Horton and Co.) and advanced some of the necessary capital. Brown invented in 1848 the conical steel spring buffer for railway wagons, and in 1860, after seeing the French ship "La Gloire" armoured with hammered plate, he determined to attempt the production of armour for the British navy by a rolling process. The experiment was successful, and led to admiralty orders for armour plate sufficient to protect about three-quarters of the navy. In 1856 Brown had started the Atlas Works in Sheffield, which soon produced, beside armour plates and railway buffers, ordnance forgings, steel rails, railway carriage axles and tires. The works covered thirty acres and employed eventually more than four thousand workmen. Besides supplying iron to the Sheffield steel trade, Brown himself successfully developed the Bessemer process. In 1864, after his business had been converted into a limited company, he retired. He died at Bromley, Kent, on the 27th of December 1896. Among the honours conferred upon him was a knighthood in 1867, the office of mayor of Sheffield in 1862 and 1863, and that of Master Cutler in 1865 and 1866.

BROWN, JOHN GEORGE (1831- ), American painter, was born in Durham, England, on the 11th of November 1831. He studied at Newcastle-on-Tyne, in the Edinburgh Academy, and after removing to New York City in 1853, at the schools of the National Academy of Design of which he afterwards became a member. In 1866 he became one of the charter members of the Water-Colour Society, of which he was president from 1887 to 1904. He generally confined himself to representations of street child life, bootblacks, newsboys, &c. ; his "Passing Show" (Paris, Salon, 1877) and "Street Boys at Play" (Paris Exhibition, 1900) are good examples of his popular talent.

BROWN, ROBERT (1773-1858), British botanist, was born on the 21st of December 1773 at Montrose, and was educated at the grammar school of his native town, where he had as contemporaries Joseph Hume and James Mill. In 1787 he entered Marischal College, Aberdeen, but two years afterwards removed to Edinburgh University, where his taste for botany attracted the attention of John Walker (1731-1803), then professor of natural history in the university. In 1795 he obtained a commission in the Forfarshire regiment of Fencible Infantry as "ensign and assistant surgeon," and served in the north of Ireland. In 1798 he made the acquaintance of Sir Joseph Banks, by whom in 1801 he was offered the post of naturalist to the expedition fitted out under Captain Matthew Flinders for the survey of the then almost unknown coasts of Australia. Ferdinand Bauer, afterwards familiarly associated with Brown in his botanical discoveries, was draughtsman; William Westall was landscape painter; and among the midshipmen was one afterwards destined to rise into fame as Sir John Franklin. In 1805 the expedition returned to England, having obtained, among other acquisitions, nearly 4000 species of plants, many of which were new. Brown was almost immediately appointed librarian of the Linnean Society. In this position, though one of no great emolument, he had abundant opportunities of pursuing his studies; but it was not until 1810 that he published the first volume of his great work, in Latin, the Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen, which did much to further the general adoption of A.L. de Jussieu's natural system of plant classification. Its merits were immediately recognized, and it gave its author an international reputation among botanists. It is rare in its original edition, the author having suppressed it, hurt at the Edinburgh Review having fallen foul of its Latinity. With the exception of a supplement published in 1830, no more of the work appeared. In 1810 Brown became librarian to Sir Joseph Banks, who on his death in 1820 bequeathed to him the use and enjoyment of his library and collections for life. In 1827 an arrangement was made by which these were transferred to the British Museum, with Brown's consent and in accordance with Sir Joseph's will. Brown then became keeper of this new botanical department, an office which he held until his death. Soon after Banks's decease he resigned the librarianship of the Linnean Society, and from 1849 to 1853 he served as its president. He received many honours. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1811, he received its Copley medal in 1839, for his "discoveries on the subject of vegetable impregnation," and in 1833 he was elected one of the five foreign associates of the Institute of France. Among his other distinctions was membership of the order "pour le Mérite" of Prussia. In the Academia Caesarea Naturae Curiosorum he sat under the cognomen of Ray. He died on the 10th of June 1858, in the house in Soho Square, London, bequeathed to him by Sir Joseph Banks. His works, which embrace not only systematic botany, but also plant anatomy and physiology, are distinguished by their thoroughness and conscientious accuracy, and display powers at once of minute detail and of broad generalization. The continual movements observed by the microscope among minute particles suspended in a liquid were noticed by him in 1827, and hence are known as "Brownian movements."

In 1825-1834 his works up to that date were collected and published in four divisions by Nees von Esenbeck, in German, under the title of Vermischte botanische Schriften (Leipzig and Nuremberg). In 1866 the Ray Society reprinted, under the editorship of his friend and successor in the keepership of the Botanical Department of the British Museum, J.J. Bennet, his complete writings, the Prodromus alone excepted. In these Miscellaneous Works (2 vols., with atlas of plates) the history of his discoveries can be best followed.

BROWN, SAMUEL MORISON (1817-1856), Scottish chemist, poet and essayist, born at Haddington on the 23rd of February 1817, was the fourth son of Samuel Brown, the founder of itinerating libraries, and grandson of John Brown, author of the Self-Interpreting Bible. In 1832 he entered the university of Edinburgh, where, after studying in Berlin and St Petersburg, he graduated as M.D. in 1839. About 1840 he was engaged in experiments by which he sought to prove that "carbon in certain states of combination is susceptible of conversion into silicon," and his failure to establish this proposition had much to do with his want of success as a candidate for the chair of chemistry at Edinburgh in 1843. He held the doctrine that the chemical elements are compounds of equal and similar atoms, and might therefore possibly be all derived from one generic atom. In 1850 he published a tragedy, Galileo Galilei, and two volumes of his Lectures on the Atomic Theory and Essays Scientific and Literary appeared in 1858, with a preface by his kinsman Dr John Brown, the author of Horae Subsecivae. He died at Edinburgh on the 20th of September 1856.

BROWN, THOMAS (1663-1704), English satirist, of "facetious memory" as Addison designates him, was the son of a farmer at Shifnal, in Shropshire, and was born in 1663. He was entered in 1678 at Christ Church, Oxford, where he is said to have escaped expulsion by the famous lines beginning, "I do not love thee, Dr Fell." He was for three years schoolmaster at Kingston-on-Thames, and afterwards settled in London. Under the pseudonym of Dudly Tomkinson he wrote a satire on Dryden, The Reasons of Mr Bays changing his Religion: considered in a Dialogue between Crites, Eugenius and Mr Bays, with two other parts having separate titles (1688-1690, republished with additions in 1691). He was the author of a great variety of poems, letters, dialogues and lampoons, full of humour and erudition, but coarse and scurrilous. His writings have a certain value for the knowledge they display of low life in London. He died on the 16th of June 1704, and was buried in the cloister of Westminster Abbey.

His collected works were published in 1707-1708. The second volume contains a collection of Letters from the Dead to the Living, some of which are translated from the French. His Comical Romance done into English (1772, the Roman Comique of Scarron) was reprinted in 1892.

BROWN, THOMAS (1778-1820), Scottish philosopher, was born at Kirkmabreck, Kirkcudbright, where his father was parish clergyman. He was a boy of a refined nature, a wide reader and an eager student. Educated at several schools in London, he went to Edinburgh University in 1792, where he attended Dugald Stewart's moral philosophy class. His attendance was desultory, and he does not appear to have completed his arts course. After studying law for a time he took up medicine; his graduation thesis De Somno was well received. But his great strength lay in metaphysical analysis, as was shown in his answer to the objections raised against the appointment of Sir John Leslie to the mathematical professorship (1805). Leslie, a follower of Hume, was attacked by the clerical party as a sceptic and an infidel, and Brown took the opportunity to defend Hume's doctrine of causality as in no way inimical to religion. His defence, at first only a pamphlet, became in its third edition a lengthy treatise entitled Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, and is a fine specimen of Brown's analytical faculty. In 1806 he became a medical practitioner in partnership with James Gregory, but, though successful in his profession, preferred literature and philosophy. After twice failing in the attempt to gain a professorship in the university, he was invited, during an illness of Dugald Stewart in the session of 1808-1809, to act as his substitute, and during the following session he undertook a great part of Stewart's work. The students received him with enthusiasm, due partly to his splendid rhetoric and partly to the novelty and ingenuity of his views. In 1810 he was appointed as colleague to Stewart, a position which he held for the rest of his life. He wrote his lectures at high pressure, and devoted much time to the editing and publication of the numerous poems which he had written at various times during his life. He was also engaged in preparing an abstract of his lectures as a handbook for his class. His health, never strong, gave way under the strain of his work. He was advised to take a voyage to London, where he died on the 2nd of April 1820.

His friend and biographer, David Welsh (1793-1845), superintended the publication of his text-book, the Physiology of the Human Mind, and his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind was published by his successors, John Stewart and the Rev. E. Milroy. The latter was received with great enthusiasm both in England (where it reached its 19th edition) and in America; but recent criticism has lessened its popularity and it is now almost forgotten.

Brown's philosophy occupies an intermediate place between the earlier Scottish school and the later analytical or associational psychology. To the latter Brown really belonged, but he had preserved certain doctrines of the older school which were out of harmony with his fundamental view. He still retained a small quantum of intuitive beliefs, and did not appear to see that the very existence of these could not be explained by his theory of mental action. This intermediate or wavering position accounts for the comparative neglect into which his works have now fallen. They did much to excite thinking, and advanced many problems by more than one step, but they did not furnish a coherent system, and the doctrines which were then new have since been worked out with greater consistency and clearness.

Brown wrote a criticism of Darwin's Zoonomia (1798), and was one of the first contributors to the Edinburgh Review, in the second number of which he published a criticism of the Kantian philosophy, based entirely on Villers's French account of it. Among his poems, which are modelled on Pope and Akenside and rather commonplace, may be mentioned: Paradise of Coquettes (1814); Wanderer in Norway (1815); Warfiend (1816); Bower of Spring (1817); Agnes (1818); Emily (1819); a collected edition in 4 vols. appeared in 1820.

For a severe criticism of Brown's philosophy, see Sir W. Hamilton's Discussions and Lectures on Metaphysics; and for a high estimate of his merits, see J. S. Mill's Examination of Hamilton. See also D. Welsh's Account of the Life and Writings, &c. (1825); McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, pp. 317-337. The only German writer who seems to have known anything of Brown is Beneke, who found in him anticipations of some of his own doctrines. See Die neue Psychologie, pp. 320-330.

BROWN, THOMAS EDWARD (1830-1897), British poet, scholar and divine, was born on the 5th of May 1830, at Douglas, Isle of Man. His father, the Rev. Robert Brown, held the living of St Matthew's—a homely church in a poor district. His mother came of Scottish parentage, though born in the island. Thomas, the sixth of ten children, was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan vicarage, a short distance from Douglas, where his father (a scholar of no university, but so fastidious about composition that he would have some sentences of an English classic read to him before answering an invitation) took share with the parish schoolmaster in tutoring the clever boy until, at the age of fifteen, he was entered at King William's College. Here his abilities soon declared themselves, and hence he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, where his position (as a servitor) cost him much humiliation, which he remembered to the end of his life. He won a double first, however, and was elected a fellow of Oriel in April 1854, Dean Gaisford having refused to promote him to a senior studentship of his own college, on the ground that no servitor had ever before attained to that honour. Although at that time an Oriel fellowship conferred a deserved distinction, Brown never took kindly to the life, but, after a few terms of private pupils, returned to the Isle of Man as vice-principal of his old school. He had been ordained deacon, but did not proceed to priest's orders for many years. In 1857 he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr Stowell of Ramsey, and soon afterwards left the island once more to become headmaster of the Crypt school, Gloucester —a position which in no long time he found intolerable. From Gloucester he was summoned by the Rev. John Percival (afterwards bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to the struggling young foundation of Clifton College, which he soon raised to be one of the great public schools. Percival wanted a master for the modern side, and made an appointment to meet Brown at Oxford; "and there," he writes, "as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St Mary's Entry, in a somewhat Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedly volcanic. We very soon came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague at the beginning of the following term." At Clifton Brown remained from September 1863 to July 1892, when he retired—to the great regret of boys and masters alike, who had long since come to regard "T.E.B.'s" genius, and even his eccentricities, with a peculiar pride—to spend the rest of his days upon the island he had worshipped from childhood and often celebrated in song. His poem "Betsy Lee" appeared in Macmillan's Magazine (April and May 1873), and was published separately in the same year. It was included in Fo'c's'le Yarns (1881), which reached a second edition in 1889. This volume included at least three other notable poems—"Tommy Big-eyes," "Christmas Rose," and "Captain Tom and Captain Hugh." It was followed by The Doctor and other Poems (1887), The Manx Witch and other Poems (1889), and Old John and other Poems—a volume mainly lyrical (1893). Since his death all these and a few additional lyrics and fragments have been published in one volume by Messrs Macmillan under the title of The Collected Poems of T.E. Brown (1900). His familiar letters (edited in two volumes by an old friend, Mr S.T. Irwin, in 1900) bear witness to the zest he carried back to his native country, although his thoughts often reverted to Clifton. In October 1897 he returned to the school on a visit. He was the guest of one of the house-masters, and on Friday evening, 29th October, he gave an address to the boys of the house. He had spoken for some minutes with his usual vivacity, when his voice grew thick and he was seen to stagger. He died in less than two hours. Brown's more important poems are narrative, and written in the Manx dialect, with a free use of pauses, and sometimes with daring irregularity of rhythm. A rugged tenderness is their most characteristic note; but the emotion, while almost equally explosive in mirth and in tears, remains an educated emotion, disciplined by a scholar's sense of language. They breathe the fervour of an island patriotism (humorously aware of its limits) and of a simple natural piety. In his lyrics he is happiest when yoking one or the other of these emotions to serve a philosophy of life, often audacious, but always genial.

(A. T. Q.-C.)

BROWN, SIR WILLIAM, Bart. (1784-1864), British merchant and banker, founder of the banking-house of Brown, Shipley & Co., was born at Ballymena, Ireland, on the 30th of May 1784, the son of an Irish linen-merchant. At the age of sixteen he accompanied his father and brothers to Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., whither it had been decided to transfer the family business, but in 1809 left America for Liverpool. Here he established a branch of the firm, which had now begun to deal largely in raw cotton as well as linen and soon afterwards developed into one of general merchants and finally bankers. Brown became one of the leaders in Liverpool commerce, and in 1832 took a principal share in the reform of the system of dock-management then in vogue at that port. The great financial crisis of 1837 seriously threatened the ruin of the firm, but on Brown's urgent representations as to the multiplicity of interests involved the Bank of England agreed to advance him £2,000,000 to tide matters over. Actually Brown only found it necessary to apply for £1,000,000, which he repaid within six months. His business, both mercantile and banking, continued to increase, and in 1844 he was in possession of a sixth of the trade between Great Britain and the United States. "There is hardly," declared Richard Cobden at this period, "a wind that blows, or a tide that flows in the Mersey, that does not bring a ship freighted with cotton or some other costly commodity for Mr Brown's house." In 1856 the friction between the British and American governments due to the enlistment by British consuls of recruits for the Crimean War was largely allayed by the action of Brown, who in an interview with Lord Palmerston, then prime-minister, explained the objections taken in America. From 1846 to 1859 he was Liberal M.P. for South Lancashire. In 1860 he presented Liverpool with a public library and museum, and in 1863 was made a baronet. He died at Liverpool in 1864.

BROWN, WILLIAM LAURENCE (1755-1830), Scottish divine, was born on the 7th of January 1755 at Utrecht, where his father was minister of the English church. The father, having been appointed professor of ecclesiastical history at St Andrews, returned to Scotland in 1757, and his son went to the grammar school of that city, and then to the university. After passing through the divinity classes, he went in 1774 to the university of Utrecht, where he studied theology and civil law. In 1777 he was appointed to the English church in Utrecht, and about 1788 to the professorship of moral philosophy and ecclesiastical history in the university, to which was soon added the professorship of the law of nature. The war which followed the French Revolution finally drove Brown in January 1795 to London, where he was cordially welcomed. In 1795 the magistrates of Aberdeen appointed him to the chair of divinity, and soon after he was made principal of Marischal College. In the year 1800 he was appointed chaplain in ordinary to the king, and in 1804 dean of the chapel royal, and of the order of the Thistle. He died on the 11th of May 1830. His most widely-known works were an Essay on the Natural Equality of Men (1793), which gained the Teyler Society's prize; a treatise On the Existence of the Supreme Creator (1816), to which was awarded the first Burnet prize of £1250; and A Comparative View of Christianity, and of the other Forms of Religion with regard to their Moral Tendency (2 vols., 1826).

BROWN BESS, a name given in the British army to the flintlock musket with which the infantry were formerly armed. The term is applied generally to the weapon of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and became obsolete on the introduction of the rifle. The first part of the name derives from the colour of the wooden stock, for the name is found much earlier than the introduction of "browning" the barrel of muskets; "Bess" may be either a humorous feminine equivalent of the "brown-bill," the old weapon of the British infantry, or a corruption of the "buss," i.e. box, in "blunderbuss."

BROWNE, EDWARD HAROLD (1811-1891), English bishop, was born at Aylesbury and educated at Eton and Cambridge. He was ordained in 1836, and two years later was elected senior tutor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. From 1843 to 1849 he was vice-principal of St David's College, Lampeter, and in 1854 was appointed Norrisian professor of divinity at Cambridge. His best-known book is the Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles (vol. i., Cambridge, 1850; vol. ii., London, 1853), which remained for many years a standard work on the subject. In 1864 he was consecrated bishop of Ely, and proceeded to reorganize his diocese. He maintained that the deposition of Bishop Colenso endangered the independence of bishops. Nevertheless, he was opposed to Colenso's criticism of the Bible, and replied to it in The Pentateuch and the Elohistic Psalms (1863), written from a conservative standpoint. In 1869 he was one of the consecrating prelates when Temple became bishop of Exeter, and endeavoured to remove the prejudice against his appointment by showing that Temple was not responsible for the views of other writers in the famous Essays and Reviews (1860). He was bishop of Winchester from 1873 till 1890, when ill-health compelled him to resign.

BROWNE, HABLÔT KNIGHT (1815-1882), English artist, famous as "Phiz," the illustrator of the best-known books by Charles Dickens, Charles Lever and Harrison Ainsworth in their original editions. His talents in other directions of art were of a very ordinary kind. As an interpreter and illustrator of Dickens's characters, "Phiz," as he always signed his drawings, was in some respects the equal of his rivals Cruikshank and Leech, while, in his own way, he excelled them both. Of Huguenot extraction, he was born in Lambeth on the 11th of June 1815. His father died early and left the family badly off. Browne was apprenticed to Finden, the eminent engraver on steel, in whose studio he obtained his only artistic education. To engraving, however, he was entirely unsuited, and having in 1833 secured an important prize from the Society of Arts for a drawing of "John Gilpin," he abandoned engraving in the following year and took to other artistic work, with the ultimate object of becoming a painter. In the spring of 1836 he met Charles Dickens. It was at the moment when the serial publication of Pickwick was in danger from the want of a capable interpreter for the illustrations. Dickens knew Browne slightly as the illustrator of his little pamphlet Sunday under Three Heads, and probably this slight knowledge of his work stood the draughtsman in good stead. In the original edition of Pickwick, issued in shilling monthly parts from early in 1836 until the end of 1837, the first seven plates were drawn by Robert Seymour, a clever illustrator who committed suicide in April 1836. The next two plates were by R.W. Buss, an otherwise successful portrait-painter and lecturer, but they were so poor that a change was imperative. Browne and W.M. Thackeray called independently at the publishers' office with specimens of their powers for Dickens's inspection. The novelist preferred Browne. Browne's first two etched plates for Pickwick were signed "Nemo," but the third was signed "Phiz," a pseudonym which was retained in future. When asked to explain why he chose this name he answered that the change from "Nemo" to "Phiz" was made "to harmonize better with Dickens's Boz." Possibly Browne adopted it to conceal his identity, hoping one day to become famous as a painter. It is to be noted, however, that "Phiz" is usually attached to his better work and H.K.B. to his less successful drawings. "Phiz" undoubtedly created Sam Weller, so far as his well-known figure is concerned, as Seymour had created Pickwick. Dickens and "Phiz" were personally good friends in early days, and in 1838 travelled together to Yorkshire to see the schools of which Nicholas Nickleby became the hero; afterwards they made several journeys of this nature in company to facilitate the illustrator's work. The other Dickens characters which "Phiz" realized most successfully are perhaps Squeers, Micawber, Guppy, Major Bagstock, Mrs Gamp, Tom Pinch and, above all, David Copperfield. Of the books by Dickens which "Phiz" illustrated the best are David Copperfield, Pickwick, Dombey and Son, Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House. Browne made several drawings for Punch in early days and also towards the end of his life; his chief work in this direction being the clever design for the wrapper which was used for eighteen months from January 1842. He also contributed to Punch's Pocket Books. In addition to his work for Dickens, "Phiz" illustrated over twenty of Lever's novels (the most successful being Harry Lorrequer, Charles O'Malley, Jack Hinton and the Knight of Gwynne). He also illustrated Harrison Ainsworth's and Frank Smedley's novels. Mervyn Clitheroe by Ainsworth is one of the most admirable of the artist's Works. Browne was in continual employment by publishers until 1867, when he had a stroke of paralysis. Although he recovered slightly and made many illustrations on wood, they were by comparison inferior productions which the draughtsman's admirers would willingly ignore. In 1878 he was awarded an annuity by the Royal Academy. He gradually became worse in health, until he died on the 8th of July 1882.

Most of Browne's work was etched on steel plates because these yielded a far larger edition than copper. Browne was annoyed at some of his etchings being transferred to stone by the publishers and printed as lithographic reproductions. Partly with the view to prevent this treatment of his work he employed a machine to rule a series of lines over the plate in order to obtain what appeared to be a tint; when manipulated with acid this tint gave an effect somewhat resembling mezzotint, which at that time it was found practically impossible to transfer to stone. The illustrations executed by Browne are particularly noteworthy because they realized exactly what the reader most desired to see represented. So skilful was he in drawing and composition that no part of the story was avoided by reason of the elaborateness of the subject. Whatever was the best incident for illustration was always the one selected.

See D. Croal Thomson, Hablôt Knight Browne, "Phiz": Life and Letters (London, 1884); John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (London, 1871-1874); F.G. Kitton, "Phiz": A Memoir (London, 1882); Charles Dickens and his Illustrators (London, 1899); M.H. Spielmann, The History of Punch (London, 1895).

(D. C. T.)

BROWNE, ISAAC HAWKINS (1705-1760), English poet, was born on the 21st of January 1705 at Burton-upon-Trent, of which place his father was vicar. He was educated at Lichfield, at Westminster school, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After taking his M.A. degree he removed to Lincoln's Inn, and was called to the bar, but never practised. He was the author of "Design and Beauty," a poem addressed to his friend Joseph Highmore the painter; and of "The Pipe of Tobacco" which parodied Cibber, Ambrose Philips, Thomson, Young, Pope and Swift, who were then all living. He was elected to Parliament through private interest in 1744 and again in 1747 for the borough of Wenlock in Shropshire. In 1754 he published his chief work, De Animi Immortalitate, a Latin poem much admired by the scholars of his time. The best of the many translations of these verses is by Soame Jenyns. Browne is said by Johnson to have been "one of the first wits of this country." He was a brilliant talker in private life, especially when his tongue was loosed by wine; but he made no mark in public life. He died in London on the 14th of February 1760.

Two editions of his Poems on Various Subjects, Latin and English, were published in 1767 by his son Isaac Hawkins Browne (1745-1818), the author of two volumes of essays on religion and morals. One of these was printed for private circulation, and is said to have contained a memoir. A full account by Andrew Kippis in Biographia Britannica (1780) includes large extracts from his poems.

BROWNE, JAMES (1703-1841), Scottish man of letters, was born at Whitefield, Perthshire, in 1793. He was educated at Edinburgh and at the university of St Andrews, where he studied for the church. He wrote a "Sketch of the History of Edinburgh," for Ewbank's Picturesque Views of that city, 1823-1825. In 1826 he became a member of the Faculty of Advocates, and obtained the degree of LL.D. from King's College, Aberdeen. His works include a Critical Examination of Macculloch's Work on the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1826), Aperçu sur les Hiêroglyphes d'Égypte (Paris, 1827), a Vindication of the Scottish Bar from the Attacks of Mr Broughton, and History of the Highlands and Highland Clans (1834-1836). He was appointed editor of the Caledonian Mercury in 1827; and two years later he became sub-editor of the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he contributed a large number of articles. He died in April 1841.

BROWNE, SIR JAMES (1839-1896), Anglo-Indian engineer and administrator, was the son of Robert Browne of Falkirk in Scotland. He was educated at the military college, Addiscombe, and received a commission in the Bengal engineers in 1857. He served in the expedition against the Mahsud Waziris in 1860, being mentioned in despatches, and in 1863 in the Umbeyla campaign, when he was three times mentioned. In January 1875 he became superintendent of works for the building of the Indus bridge. In 1877 he was promoted lieutenant-colonel, and in 1878-1879 accompanied Sir Donald Stewart as political officer during the Afghan War. He took part in several engagements, was mentioned in despatches, and received the C.B. In 1881 he became colonel, and in 1882 commanded the Indian engineer contingent sent to Egypt, being present at the battle of Tell-el-Kebir. For his services in Egypt he received the 3rd class of the Osmanieh Order and the khedive's star. In 1884 he was appointed engineer in chief of the Sind-Pishin railway. In 1888 he was made a K.C.S.I, and in 1889 quarter-master-general for India. In 1892 he was appointed agent to the governor-general in Baluchistan, in succession to Sir Robert Sandeman, his intimate experience of the Baluchis, gained during his railway work, having specially fitted him for this post. He died suddenly on the 13th of June 1896. Sir James Browne was a man of splendid courage and physique, and many tales are told of the personal prowess which, together with his sympathetic knowledge of the natives, made him a popular hero among the frontier tribesmen.

See General McLeod Innes, The Life and Times of Sir James Browne (1905).

BROWNE, MAXIMILIAN ULYSSES, Count von, Baron de Camus and Mountany (1705-1757), Austrian field marshal, was born at Basel on the 23rd of October 1705. His father (Ulysses Freiherr v. Browne, d. 1731) was an Irish exile of 1690, who entered the imperial service and in 1716 was made a count of the Empire (Reichsgraf) by the emperor Charles VI. His uncle Georg, Reichsgraf von Browne (1698-1792), was a distinguished soldier, who rose to the rank of field marshal in the Russian army, and was made Reichsgraf by the emperor Joseph II. in 1779. The powerful influence which he commanded, through his father and his wife (née Countess Marie Philippine v. Martinitz), advanced the young officer through the subordinate grades so rapidly that at the age of twenty-nine he was colonel of an infantry regiment. But he justified his early promotion in the field, and in the Italian campaign of 1734 he greatly distinguished himself. In the Tirolese fighting of 1735, and in the unfortunate Turkish war, he won further distinction as a general officer. He was a lieutenant field marshal in command of the Silesian garrisons when in 1740 Frederick II. and the Prussian army overran the province. His careful employment of such resources as he possessed materially hindered the king in his conquest and gave time for Austria to collect a field army (see Austrian Succession, War of the). He was present at Mollwitz, where he received a severe wound. His vehement opposition to all half-hearted measures brought him frequently into conflict with his superiors, but contributed materially to the unusual energy displayed by the Austrian armies in 1742 and 1743. In the following campaigns Browne exhibited the same qualities of generalship and the same impatience of control. In 1745 he served under Count Traun, and was promoted to the rank of Feldzeugmeister. In 1746 he was present in the Italian campaign and the battles of Piacenza and Rottofredo. Browne himself with the advanced guard forced his way across the Apennines and entered Genoa. He was thereafter placed in command of the army intended for the invasion of France, and early in 1747 of all the imperial forces in Italy. At the end of the war Browne was engaged in the negotiations which led to the convention of Nice (January 21st, 1749). He became commander-in-chief in Bohemia in 1751, and field marshal two years later. He was still in Bohemia when the Seven Years' War opened with Frederick's invasion of Saxony (1756). Browne's army, advancing to the relief of Pirna (see Seven Years' War), was met, and, after a hard struggle, defeated by the king at Lobositz, but he drew off in excellent order, and soon made another attempt with a picked force to reach Pirna, by wild mountain tracks. The field marshal never spared himself, bivouacking in the snow with his men, and Carlyle records that private soldiers made rough shelters over him as he slept. He actually reached the Elbe at Schandau, but as the Saxons were unable to break out Browne retired, having succeeded, however, in delaying the development of Frederick's operations for a whole campaign. In the campaign of 1757 he voluntarily served under Prince Charles of Lorraine (q.v.) who was made commander-in-chief, and on the 6th of May in that year, while leading a bayonet charge at the battle of Prague, Browne, like Schwerin on the same day, met his death. He was carried mortally wounded into Prague, and there died on the 26th of June, his last days embittered by the knowledge that he was unjustly held responsible for the failure of the campaign. His name has been borne, since 1888, by the 36th Austrian infantry.

See Zuverlässige Lebensbeschreibung U.M. Reichsgrafen, v. B. K.-K. Gen.-Feldmarschall (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1757); Baron O'Cahill, Gesch. der grossten Herrfuhrer (Rastadt, 1785, v. ii. pp. 264-316).

BROWNE, PETER (?1665-1735), Irish divine and bishop of Cork and Ross, was born in Co. Dublin, not long after the Restoration. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1682, and after ten years' residence obtained a fellowship. In 1699 he was made provost of the college, and in the same year published his Letter in answer to a Book entitled "Christianity not Mysterious," which was recognized as the ablest reply yet written to Toland. It expounds in germ the whole of his later theory of analogy. In 1710 he was made bishop of Cork and Ross, which post he held till his death in 1733. In 1713 he had become somewhat notorious from his vigorous pamphleteering attack on the fashion of drinking healths, especially "to the glorious and immortal memory." His two most important works are the Procedure, Extent, and, Limits of the Human Understanding (1728), an able though sometimes captious critique of Locke's essay, and Things Divine and Supernatural conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Human, more briefly referred to as the Divine Analogy (1733). The doctrine of analogy was intended as a reply to the deistical conclusions that had been drawn from Locke's theory of knowledge. Browne holds that not only God's essence, but his attributes are inexpressible by our ideas, and can only be conceived analogically. This view was vigorously assailed as leading to atheism by Berkeley in his Alciphron (Dialogue iv.), and a great part of the Divine Analogy is occupied with a defence against that criticism. The bishop emphasizes the distinction between metaphor and analogy; though the conceived attributes are not thought as they are in themselves, yet there is a reality corresponding in some way to our ideas of them. His analogical arguments resemble those found in the Bampton Lectures of Dean Mansel. Browne was a man of abstemious habits, charitable disposition, and impressive eloquence. He died on the 27th of August 1735.

BROWNE, ROBERT (1550-1633), a leader among the early Separatist Puritans (hence sometimes called Brownists), was born about 1550 at Tolethorpe, near Stamford. He was of an ancient family, several members of which had been distinguished as merchants, county magnates and local benefactors. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, "commencing B.A." in 1572. For some years he was a schoolmaster, but in what place is uncertain. In 1579, on a brother's application and without his own consent, he was licensed to preach, and actually preached for some six months in Cambridge, where he gained considerable popularity; but impugning the episcopal order of the Established Church, he had his licence revoked early in the following year. He then went, on the invitation of Robert Harrison, "Maister in the Hospitall," to Norwich, where he soon gathered a numerous congregation, the members of which became associated in a religious "covenant," to the refusing of "all ungodlie communion with wicked persons." He seems also to have preached in various parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, especially at Bury St Edmunds, and vigorously denounced the form of government existing in the Church, which at this time he held incompatible with true "preaching of the word." Dr Freake, bishop of Norwich, caused him to be imprisoned early in 1581, but he was ere long released through the influence of his remote kinsman, the Lord Treasurer Burghley. Before the end of 1581, however, he incurred two more imprisonments, and, apparently in January 1582, migrated with his whole company to Middelburg in Zealand. There they organized a church on what they conceived to be the New Testament model, but the community broke up within two years owing to internal dissensions.

Meanwhile, Browne issued two most important works, A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie, in which he asserts the inalienable right of the church to effect necessary reforms without the authorization or permission of the civil magistrate; and A Booke which sheweth the life and manners of all True Christians, in which he enunciates the theory of Congregational independency (see Congregationalism). These, with a third tract (A Treatise upon the 23. of Matthew, see C. Burrage, as below, pp. 21-25), making together a thin quarto, were published at Middelburg in 1582. The following year two men were hanged at Bury St Edmunds for circulating them. In January 1584 Browne and some of his company came to Edinburgh, after visiting Dundee and St Andrews. He remained some months in Scotland, endeavouring to commend his ecclesiastical theories, but had no success. He then returned to Stamford, in which town or neighbourhood he seems to have resided chiefly for the next two years, his residence being broken by visits to London and probably to the continent (early in 1585), and by at least one imprisonment (summer, 1585). His attitude to the lawfulness of occasional attendance at services in parish churches seems to have been changing about this time; on the 7th of October 1585 he was induced to make a qualified submission to the established order. The story that this result was brought about by excommunication, actual or threatened, is very doubtful, and rests on late and questionable authority. A further submission prepared the way for his appointment, in November 1586, to the mastership of St Olave's grammar school, Southwark, which he held for more than two years. During part of this time he was much engaged in controversy, on the one hand with Stephen Bredwell, an uncompromising advocate of the established order, and on the other with some of those who more or less occupied his own earlier position, and now looked upon him as a renegade. In particular he several times replied to Barrowe and Greenwood; one of his replies, entitled A Reproofe of certaine schismatical persons and their doctrine touching the hearing and preaching of the word of God (1587-1588), has recently been recovered, and sheds a flood of light upon the development of Browne's later views (see Burrage, pp. 45-62, for this whole period).

Before the 20th of June 1589 his mastership of St Olave's seems to have terminated, and after being rector of Little Casterton (in the gift of his eldest brother) for a month or two, he finally, in September 1591, accepted episcopal ordination and the rectory of Achurch-cum-Thorpe Waterville, in Northamptonshire. There he ministered for forty-two years, with one lengthy interval, 1617-1626, which is only partly accounted for (see Burrage, pp. 68-71). There is reason to believe that he never entirely abandoned his early ideal, but latterly thought it possible to maintain a spiritual fellowship within the framework of the Established Church. The closing years of his life seem to have been clouded, due partly to separation among his own flock, and partly to growing irritability in himself, a lonely and disappointed man. When over eighty years old he had a dispute with the parish constable about a rate, blows were struck, and before a magistrate he behaved so stubbornly that he was sent to Northampton gaol, where he died in October 1633. He was buried in St Giles's churchyard, Northampton. In spite of his later attitude of compromise with expediency, which he felt forced on him by external conditions too strong to defy or ignore, Robert Browne remains a pioneer in ecclesiastical theory in England, the first formulator of an ideal which subsequently became known as Congregationalism (q.v.). He rediscovered certain forgotten aspects of primitive church life, and did not shrink from suffering for the sake of what he held to be the truth. In addition to the works above-mentioned, Browne wrote several controversial and apologetic treatises, of which some remained in MS. until quite recently, and some are still missing.

See H.M. Dexter, The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years (1880); C. Burrage, The True Story of Robert Browne (Oxford, 1906); Congregational Historical Society's Transactions, passim (1901-1906).

Probably after writing A True and Short Declaration, the main source of our knowledge of his life hitherto.

BROWNE, SIR THOMAS (1605-1682), English author and physician, was born in London, on the 19th of October 1605. He was admitted as a scholar of Winchester school in 1616, and matriculated at Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College), Oxford, in 1623, where he graduated B.A. in January 1626. He took the further degree of M.A. in 1629, studied medicine, and practised for some time in Oxfordshire. Between 1630 and 1633 he left England, travelled in Ireland, France and Italy, and on his way home received the degree of M.D. at the university of Leiden. He returned to London in 1634, and, after a short residence at Shipden Hall, near Halifax, settled in practice at Norwich in 1637. He married in 1641 Dorothy Mileham. Their eldest son, Edward, became president of the Royal College of Physicians, and glimpses of their happy family life are obtainable in the fragmentary correspondence contained in Simon Wilkin's edition. In 1642 a copy of his Religio Medici, which he describes as "a private exercise directed to myself," was printed from one of his MSS. without his knowledge, and reviewed by Sir Kenelm Digby in Observations ... (1643). The interest aroused by this edition compelled Browne to put forth a correct version (1643) of the work, in which letters between Digby and Browne were included. The book was probably written as early as 1635, for he describes himself as still under thirty. In 1646 he published Pseudodoxia Epidemica; Enquiries into very many commonly received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths (1646), and in 1658 Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall; or, a discourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk. Together with the Garden of Cyrus, or the quincunciall, lozenge, or net-work plantations of the ancients, artificially, naturally, and mystically considered. With Sundry observations (1658). These four works were all that he published, though several tracts, notably the Christian Morals intended as a continuation of Religio Medici, were prepared for publication, and appeared posthumously. In 1671 he received the honour of knighthood from Charles II. on his visit to Norwich. He began a correspondence with John Evelyn in 1658. Very few of the letters are extant, but the diarist has left an account of a visit to Browne (Diary, 17th of October 1671). He died in 1682 on his seventy-seventh birthday, and was buried at St Peter's, Mancroft, Norwich. His coffin was accidentally broken in 1840, and his skull is preserved in the museum of the Norwich hospital.

Browne's writings are among the few specimens of purely literary work produced during a period of great political excitement and discord. He remained to all appearance placidly indifferent to the struggle going on around him. His first book appeared in the year of the outbreak of the Civil War; Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the critical year of 1646; and Hydriotaphia, the reflections on the shortness of human life inspired by the unearthing of some funeral urns, on the eve of the Restoration. A mind as aloof as his is a psychological curiosity, and its peculiarities are faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his works. His display of erudition, his copious citations from authorities, his constant use of metaphor and analogy, and his elaborate diction, are common qualities of the writers of the 17th century, but Browne stands apart from his contemporaries by reason of the peculiar cast of his mind. Imbued with the Platonic mysticism which taught him to look on this world as only the image, the shadow of an invisible system, he regarded the whole of experience as only food for contemplation. Nothing is too great or too small for him; all finds a place in the universe of being, which he seems to regard almost from the position of an outsider. He did not speculate systematically on the problems of existence, but he meditates repeatedly on the outward and visible signs of mortality, and on what lies beyond death. Of Browne, as of the greatest writers, it is true that the style is the man. The form of his thought is as peculiar and remarkable as the matter; the two, indeed, react on one another. Much of the quaintness of his style, no doubt, depends on the excessive employment of latinized words, many of which have failed to justify their existence; but the peculiarities of his vocabulary do not explain the unique character of his writing, which is appreciated to-day as much as ever.

The Religio Medici was a puzzle to his contemporaries, and it is still hard to reconcile its contradictions. A Latin translation appeared at Leiden in 1644, and it was widely read on the continent, being translated subsequently into Dutch, French and German. In Paris it was issued in the belief that Browne was really a Roman Catholic, but in Rome the authorities thought otherwise, and the book was placed on the Index Expurgatorius. It is the confession of a mind keen and sceptical in some aspects, and credulous in others. Browne professes to be absolutely free from heretical opinions, but asserts the right to be guided by his own reason in cases where no precise guidance is given either by Scripture or by Church teaching. "I love," he says, "to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O, Altitudo!" The Pseudodoxia Epidemica, written in a more direct and simple style than is usual with Browne, is a wonderful storehouse of out-of-the-way facts and scraps of erudition, exhibiting a singular mixture of credulity and shrewdness. Sir Thomas evidently takes delight in discussing the wildest fables. That he himself was by no means free from superstition is proved by the fact that the condemnation of two unfortunate women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, for witchcraft at Norwich in 1664 was aided by his professional evidence. The Garden of Cyrus is a continued illustration of one quaint conceit. The whole universe is ransacked for examples of the Quincunx, and he discovers, as Coleridge says, "quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything!" But the whole strength of his genius and the wonderful charm of his style are to be sought in the Urnburial, the concluding chapter of which, for richness of imagery and majestic pomp of diction, can hardly be paralleled in the English language. For anything at all resembling it we must turn to the finest passages of Jeremy Taylor or of Milton's prose writings.

In 1684 appeared a collection of Certain Miscellany Tracts (ed. Tenison), and in 1712 Posthumous Works of the learned Sir Thomas Browne. The first collected edition of Browne's works appeared in 1686. It is said to have been edited by Dr, afterwards Archbishop Tenison. Sir Thomas Browne's Works, including his Life and Correspondence, were carefully edited by Simon Wilkin in 1835-1836. Among modern reprints may be mentioned Dr W.A. Greenhill's editions in the "Golden Treasury" series of the Religio Medici, Letter to a friend and Christian Morals (1881), with an admirable bibliographical note on the complicated subject of the numerous editions of the Religio Medici; of the Hydriotaphia and the Garden of Cyrus (1896), completed by Mr E.H. Marshall; a complete edition for the English Library, edited by Mr Charles Sayle (1904, &c.). Browne's interest in bird-lore is noted by Evelyn, and some Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk were collected from his MSS. in the Sloane Collection, and edited by Thomas Southwell in 1902.

Ed. John Jeffery, archdeacon of Norwich, 1716. The dignified "Letter to a Friend, upon the occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend" (written about 1672, pr. 1690) has been generally supposed to be a preliminary sketch for Christian Morals, but Dr W.A. Greenhill thinks it was written later.

BROWNE, WILLIAM (1591-1643), English pastoral poet, was born at Tavistock, Devonshire, in 1591, of a branch of the family of Browne of Betchworth Castle, Surrey. He received his early education at the grammar school of his native town, and is said to have proceeded to Oxford about 1603. After a short residence at Clifford's Inn he entered the Inner Temple in 1611. His elegy on the death of Henry, prince of Wales, and the first book of Britannia's Pastorals appeared in 1613; the Shepherd's Pipe, which contained some eclogues by other poets, in 1614. The second book of the pastorals (1616) is dedicated to William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, whose seat at Wilton was Browne's home for some time. In 1624 he returned to Oxford as tutor to Robert Dormer, afterwards earl of Carnarvon, matriculating at Exeter College in April and receiving his M.A. degree in November of the same year. Nearly all Browne's poetic work dates from his early manhood, before his marriage in 1628 with Timothy, daughter of Sir Thomas Eversham of Horsham, Essex. In the fourth eclogue of George Wither's Shepherd's Hunting, written as early as 1613-1614, Philarete (Wither) asks Willy (Browne) why he is silent, and the reply is that some "my music do contemne." The times were unfavourable to his tranquil talent, and the second half of his life was spent in retirement. He died some time before 1645, when letters of administration were granted to his widow, and he may have been the William Browne whose burial is recorded in the Tavistock registers under the date of the 27th of March 1643.

Browne was the pupil and friend of Michael Drayton, who associates "my Browne" in the "Epistle to Henry Reynolds" with the two Beaumonts as "my dear companions whom I freely chose, My bosom friends." But directly indebted as Browne is for the form of his poems, for the slight story and the rather wearisome allegory, to Spenser, Sidney, Drayton and especially to Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, his poetry is no mere copy of any of these models. His Arcadia is localized in his native Devonshire. He was untiring in his praises of "Tavy's voiceful stream (to whom I owe more strains than from my pipe can ever flow)." He knew local history and traditions, and he celebrates the gallant sailors who "by their power made the Devonian shore Mock the proud Tagus." (Brit. Past. bk. ii., song 3). It is for his truthful, affectionate pictures of his country life and its surroundings that the stories of Marina and Celandine, Doridon and the rest are still read. A copy of Browne's pastorals with annotations in Milton's handwriting is preserved in the Huth library, and there are many points of likeness between Lycidas and the elegy on Philarete (Thomas Manwood) in the fourth eclogue of the Shepherd's Pipe. Keats was a student of Browne, and Herrick's fairy fantasies are thought to owe something to the third book of the pastorals.

The first two books of Britannia's Pastorals were re-issued in 1625. The third, though it had no doubt circulated in the author's lifetime, remained unknown until Beriah Botfield discovered a copy of it in the library of Salisbury cathedral, bound up with the 1613 and 1616 editions of the first and second books. This MS. was edited for the Percy Society by T.C. Croker in 1852. A collected edition of Browne's works was published in 1772 by John Davies. It is not known whether The Inner Temple Masque on the story of Ulysses and Circe, which was written for performance on the 13th of January 1615, was ever actually represented. A series of sonnets to Caelia, some epistles, elegies and epitaphs, with some other miscellaneous poems, complete the list of Browne's works. These have been collected from various sources, the most important being Lansdowne MS. 777 (British Museum), and they were printed for the first time by Sir S.E. Brydges in 1815. Excellent modern complete editions of Browne and Mr W.C. Hazlitt's (1868-1869) for the Roxburghe library, and a more compact one (1894) by Mr Gordon Goodwin, with an introduction by Mr A.H. Bullen, for the "Muse's Library." For an elaborate analysis of Browne's obligations to earlier pastoral writers see F.W. Moorman, "William Browne" (Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Culturgeschichte der Germanischen Völker Strassburg, 1897). A translation of Marin le Roy de Gomberville's Polexandre, by William Browne (1647), may be a posthumous work of the poet's.

BROWNE, WILLIAM GEORGE (1768-1813), English traveller, was born at Great Tower Hill, London, on the 25th of July 1768. At seventeen he was sent to Oriel College, Oxford. Having had a moderate competence left him by his father, on quitting the university he applied himself entirely to literary pursuits. But the fame of James Bruce's travels, and of the first discoveries made by the African Association, determined him to become an explorer of Central Africa. He went first to Egypt, arriving at Alexandria in January 1792. He spent some time in visiting the oasis of Siwa or Jupiter Ammon, and employed the remainder of the year in studying Arabic and in examining the ruins of ancient Egypt. In the spring of 1793 he visited Sinai, and in May set out for Darfur, joining the great caravan which every year went by the desert route from Egypt to that country. This was his most important journey, in which he acquired a great variety of original information. He was forcibly detained by the sultan of Darfur and endured much hardship, being unable to effect his purpose of returning by Abyssinia. He was, however, allowed to return to Egypt with the caravan in 1796; after this he spent a year in Syria, and did not arrive in London till September 1798. In 1799 he published his Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria, from the year 1792 to 1798. The work was full of valuable information; but, from the abruptness and dryness of the style, it never became popular. In 1800 Browne again left England, and spent three years in visiting Greece, some parts of Asia Minor and Sicily. In 1812 he once more set out for the East, proposing to penetrate to Samarkand and survey the most interesting regions of central Asia. He spent the winter in Smyrna, and in the spring of 1813 travelled through Asia Minor and Armenia, made a short stay at Erzerum, and arrived on the 1st of June at Tabriz. About the end of the summer of 1813 he left Tabriz for Teheran, intending to proceed thence into Tartary, but was shortly afterwards murdered. Some bones, believed to be his, were afterwards found and interred near the grave of Jean de Thevenot, the French traveller.

Robert Walpole published, in the second volume of his Memoirs relating to European and Asiatic Turkey (1820), from papers left by Browne, the account of his journey in 1802 through Asia Minor to Antioch and Cyprus; also Remarks written at Constantinople (1802).

BROWNHILLS, an urban district in the Lichfield parliamentary division of Staffordshire, England, 6 m. W. of Lichfield, on branch lines of the London & North-Western and Midland railways, and near the Essington Canal. Pop. (1891) 11,820; (1901) 15,252. There are extensive coal-mines in the district, forming part of the Cannock Chase deposit. The town lies on the Roman Watling Street, and remains of earthworks are seen at Knave's Castle, on the Street, and at Castle Old Fort, 2 m. S.E. Ogley Hay, the parish of which partly covers Brownhills, is a large adjoining village; there are also Great Wyrley and Norton-under-Cannock or Norton Canes to the N.W. and N., with collieries, and at Church Bridge are brick, tile, and edge-tool works. Wyrley Grove is a picturesque mansion of the 17th century.

BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT (1806-1861), English poet, wife of the poet Robert Browning, was born probably at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, for this was the home of her father and mother for some time after their marriage in 1805. Her baptismal register gives the date of her birth as the 6th of March 1806, and that of her christening as the 10th of February 1808. The long misunderstanding as to her age, whereby she was supposed to have been born three years later, was shared by her contemporaries and even for a time by her husband. She was the daughter and eldest child of Edward Barrett Moulton, who added the surname of Barrett on the death of his maternal grandfather, whose estates in Jamaica he inherited. His wife was Mary Graham-Clarke, daughter of J. Graham-Clarke of Fenham Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne. She died when her illustrious daughter was twenty-two years old. Elizabeth's childhood was passed in the country, chiefly at Hope End, a house bought by her father in the beautiful country in sight of the Malvern Hills. "They seem to me," she wrote, "my native hills; for though I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighbourhood, and lived there until I had passed twenty by several years." Her country poems, such as "The Lost Bower," "Hector in the Garden," and "The Deserted Garden," refer to the woods and gardens of Hope End. Elizabeth Barrett was much the companion of her father, who pleased himself with printing fifty copies of what she calls her "great epic of eleven or twelve years old, in four books"—The Battle of Marathon (sent to the printer in 1819). She owns this to have been "a curious production for a child," but disclaims for it anything more than "an imitative faculty." The love of Pope's Homer, she adds, led her to the study of Greek, and of Latin as a help to Greek, "and the influence of all those tendencies is manifest so long afterwards as in my Essay on Mind [Essay on Mind and other Poems, 1826], a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented of." She was a keen student, and it is told of her that when her health failed she had her Greek books bound so as to look like novels, for fear her doctor should forbid her continuous study. At this time began her friendship with the blind scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, with whom she read Greek authors, and especially the Greek Christian Fathers and Poets. To him she addressed later three of her sonnets, and he was one of her chief friends until his death in 1848. In 1832 Mr Barrett sold his house of Hope End, and brought his family to Sidmouth, Devon, for some three years. There Elizabeth made a translation of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, published with some original poems (1833). After that time London became the home of the Barretts until the children married and the father died. The temporary dwelling was at 74 Gloucester Place, Portman Square, and in 1838 the lease was taken of the final house, 50 Wimpole Street.

It is in the middle of the year 1836 that Elizabeth Barrett's active literary life began. She then made the acquaintance of R.H. Horne, afterwards famous for a time as the author of Orion, but perhaps best remembered as her correspondent (Letters to R.H. Horne, 2 vols. 1877), and this acquaintance led to the appearance of rather frequent poems by Miss Barrett in the New Monthly Magazine, edited by Bulwer (Lord Lytton), and in other magazines or annuals. But the publication of The Seraphim and other Poems (1838) was a graver step. "My present attempt," she writes in this year, "is actually, and will be considered by others, more a trial of strength than either of my preceding ones." There was at that date a lull in the production of conspicuous books of poetry. Wordsworth had ceased, Browning and Tennyson had hardly begun to write their best. Miss Barrett's volume was well reviewed, but not popular, and no second edition was required; of the poems afterwards famous it contained three, "Cowper's Grave," "My Doves," and "The Sea-Mew," the first impassioned and the other two very quiet, which a fine taste must rank high among all her works. The Quarterly Review (September 1840), in an article on "Modern English Poetesses," criticizes The Seraphim with Prometheus, and treats the former with respect, but does not lift the author out of the quite unequal company of Mrs Norton, "V," and other contemporary women. In the previous year Elizabeth had made the memorable acquaintance of Wordsworth. "No," she writes, "I was not at all disappointed in Wordsworth, although perhaps I should not have singled him from the multitude as a great man. There is a reserve even in his countenance; ... his eyes have more meekness than brilliancy; and in his slow, even articulation there is rather the solemnity and calmness of truth itself than the animation and energy of those who seek for it ... He was very kind, and sate near me and talked to me as long as he was in the room, and recited a translation by Cary of a sonnet of Dante's—and altogether it was a dream." With Landor, at the same date, a meeting took place that had long results. At this time, too, began another of Elizabeth's valued friendships—that with Miss Mitford, author of Our Village and other works less well remembered. Mr John Kenyon also became at about this time a dear and intimate friend. He was a distant cousin of the Barretts, had published some verse, and was a warm and generous friend to men of letters. From the date of the birth of their child (1849) he gave the Brownings a hundred pounds a year, and when he died in 1856 he bequeathed to them eleven thousand pounds. To him a great number of Elizabeth's letters are addressed, and to him in later years was Aurora Leigh dedicated. Elizabeth Barrett began also in London an acquaintance with Harriet Martineau.

Full of the interest of friendship and literature, the residence in London was unfavourable to Elizabeth's health. In early girlhood she had a spinal affection, and her lungs became delicate. She broke a blood-vessel in the beginning of the Barretts' life in town, and was thereafter an invalid—by no means entirely confined to her room, but often imprisoned there, and generally a recluse, until her marriage. Her state was so threatening that in 1838 it was found necessary to remove her to Torquay, where she spent three years, accompanied by her brother Edward, the dearest of her eight brothers, the only one, she said many years later, who ever comprehended her, and for a time by her father and sisters. During this time of physical suffering she underwent the greatest grief of her life by the drowning of her beloved brother, who with two friends went sailing in a small boat and was lost in Babbacombe Bay. Rumours of the foundering reached the unhappy sister, who was assured of the worst after three days, when the bodies were found. The accident of Edward Barrett's meeting with his death through her residence at Torquay, and the minor accident of her having parted from him on the day of his death, as she said, "with pettish words," increased her anguish of heart to horror. A few days before she had written, "There are so many mercies close around me that God's being seems proved to me, demonstrated to me, by His manifested love." When the blow came, its heavy weight and closeness to her heart convinced her, she wrote, through an awful experience of suffering, of divine action. But many years later the mention of her brother's death was intolerable to her. At the time she only did not die. She had to remain for nearly a year day and night within hearing of the sea, of which the sound seemed to her the moan of a dying man.

There is here an interval of silence in the correspondence which busied her secluded life at all ages; but with an impulse of self-protection she went to work as soon as her strength sufficed. One of her tasks was a part taken in the Chaucer Modernized (1841), a work suggested by Wordsworth, to which he, Leigh Hunt, Horne and others contributed. In 1841 she returned to Wimpole Street, and in that and the following year she was at work on two series of articles on the Greek Christian poets and on the English poets, written for the Athenaeum under the editorship of Mr C.W. Dilke. In work she found some interest and even some delight: "Once I wished not to live, but the faculty of life seems to have sprung up in me again from under the crushing foot of heavy grief. Be it all as God wills."

It is in 1842 that we notice the name of Robert Browning in her letters: "Mr Horne the poet and Mr Browning the poet were not behind in approbation," she says in regard to her work on the poets. "Mr Browning is said to be learned in Greek, especially the dramatists." In this year also she declares her love for Tennyson. To Kenyon she writes, "I ought to be thanking you for your great kindness about this divine Tennyson." In 1842, moreover, she had the pleasure of a letter from Wordsworth, who had twice asked Kenyon for permission to visit her. The visit was not permitted on account of Miss Barrett's ill-health. Now Haydon sent her his unfinished painting of the great poet musing upon Helvellyn; she wrote her sonnet on the portrait, and Haydon sent it to Rydal Mount. Wordsworth's commendation is rather cool. In August 1843 "The Cry of the Children" appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, and during the year she was associated with her friend Horne in a critical work, The New Spirit of the Age, rather by advice than by direct contribution. Her two volumes of poems (1844) appeared, six years after her former book, under the title of Poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. The warmest praises that greeted the new poems were H.F. Chorley's in the Athenaeum, John Forster's in the Examiner, and those conveyed in Blackwood, the Dublin Review, the New Quarterly and the Atlas. Letters came from Carlyle and others. Both he and Miss Martineau selected as their favourite poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a violent piece of work. In the beginning of the following year came the letter from a stranger that was to be so momentous to both. "I had a letter from Browning the poet last night," she writes to her old friend Mrs Martin, "which threw me into ecstasies—Browning, the author of Paracelsus, the king of the mystics." She is flattered, though not to "ecstasies," at about the same time by a letter from E.A. Poe, and by the dedication to her, as "the noblest of her sex," of his own work. "What is to be said, I wonder, when a man calls you the 'noblest of your sex'? 'Sir, you are the most discerning of yours.'" America was at least as quick as England to appreciate her poetry; among other messages thence came in the spring letters from Lowell and from Mrs Sigourney. "She says that the sound of my poetry is stirring the 'deep green forests of the New World'; which sounds pleasantly, does it not?" It is in the same year that the letters first speak of the hope of a journey to Italy. The winters in London, with the imprisonment which—according to the medical practice of that day—they entailed, were lowering Elizabeth's strength of resistance against disease. She longed for the change of light, scene, manners and language, and the longing became a hope, until her father's prohibition put an end to it, and doomed her, as she and others thought, to death, without any perceptible reason for the denial of so reasonable a desire.

Meanwhile the friendship with Browning had become the chief thing in Elizabeth Barrett's life. The correspondence, once begun, had not flagged. In the early summer they met. The allusion to his poetry in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" had doubtless put an edge to his already keen wish to know her. He became her frequent visitor and kept her room fragrant with flowers. He never lagged, whether in friendship or in love. We have the strange privilege, since the publication of the letters between the two, of following the whole course of this noble love-story from beginning to end, and day by day. Browning was six years younger than the woman he so passionately admired, and he at first believed her to be confined by some hopeless physical injury to her sofa. But of his own wish and resolution he never doubted. Her hesitation, in her regard for his liberty and strength, to burden him with an ailing wife, she has recorded in the Sonnets afterwards published under a slight disguise as Sonnets from the Portuguese. She refused him once "with all her will, but much against her heart," and yielded at last for his sake rather than her own. Her father's will was that his children should not marry, and, kind and affectionate father though he was, the prohibition took a violent form and struck terror into the hearts of the three dutiful and sensitive girls. Robert Browning's addresses were, therefore, kept secret, for fear of scenes of anger which the most fragile of the three could not face. Browning was reluctant to practise the deception; Elizabeth alone knew how impossible it was to avoid it. When she was persuaded to marry, it was she who insisted, in mental and physical terror, upon a secret wedding. Throughout the summer of 1846 her health improved, and on the 12th of September the two poets were married in St Marylebone parish church. Browning visited it on his subsequent journeys to England to give thanks for what had taken place at its altar. Elizabeth's two sisters had been permitted to know of the engagement, but not of the wedding, so that their father's anger might not fall on them too heavily. For a week Mrs Browning remained in her father's house. On the 19th of September she left it, taking her maid and her little dog, joined her husband, and crossed to the Continent. She never entered that home again, nor did her father ever forgive her. Her letters, written with tears to entreat his pardon, were never answered. They were all subsequently returned to her unopened. Among them was one she had written, in the prospect of danger, before the birth of her child. With her sisters her relations were, as before, most affectionate. Her brothers, one at least of whom disapproved of her action, held for a time aloof. All others were taken entirely by surprise. Mrs Jameson, who had been one of the few intimate visitors to Miss Barrett's room, had offered to take her to Italy that year, but met her instead on her way thither with a newly-married husband. The poets' journey was full of delight. Where she could not walk, up long staircases or across the waters of the stream at Vaucluse, Browning carried her. In October they reached Pisa, and there they wintered, Mrs Jameson keeping them company for a time lest ignorance of practical things should bring them, in their poverty, to trouble. She soon found that they were both admirable economists; not that they gave time and thought to husbandry, but that they knew how to enjoy life without luxuries. So they remained to the end, frugal and content with little.

For climate and cheapness they settled in Italy, choosing Florence in the spring of 1847, and remaining there, with the interruptions of a change to places in Italy such as Siena and Rome, and to Paris and England, until Mrs Browning's death. It was at Pisa that Robert Browning first saw the Sonnets from the Portuguese, poems which his wife had written in secret and had no thought of publishing. He, however, resolved to give them to the world. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." The judgment, which the existence of Wordsworth's sonnets renders obviously absurd, may be pardoned. The sonnets were sent to Miss Mitford and published at Reading, as Sonnets by E.B.B., in 1847. In 1850 they were included, under their final title, in a new issue of poems. During the Pisan autumn appeared in Blackwood's Magazine seven poems by Mrs Browning which she had sent some time before, and the publication of which at that moment disturbed her as likely to hurt her father by an apparent reference to her own story. At Pisa also she wrote and sent to America a poem, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point," which was published in Boston, in The Liberty Bell, in 1848, and separately in England in 1849. In the summer of 1847 the Brownings left their temporary dwelling in Florence and took the apartment in Casa Guidi, near the Pitti Palace, which was thenceforth their chief home. Early in their residence began that excited interest in Italian affairs which made so great a part of Mrs Browning's emotional life. The Florentines, under the government of the grand duke, were prosperous but disturbed by national aspirations. Mrs Browning, by degrees, wrote Casa Guidi Windows on their behalf and as an appeal to the always impulsive sympathies of England. In 1849 was born the Brownings' only child, their beloved son Robert Wiedemann Barrett. After this event Mrs Browning resumed her literary activities, preparing a new issue, with some additions, of her poems (1850). A poem on the death of a friend's child appeared in the Athenaeum (1849), and there the new volumes were warmly praised. Casa Guidi Windows followed in 1851. Visiting England in that year, the Brownings saw much of the Procters, and something of Florence Nightingale, Kingsley, Ruskin, Rogers, Patmore and Tennyson, and also of Carlyle, with whom they went to Paris, where they saw George Sand, and where they passed the December days of the coup d'état. Mrs Browning happened to take a political fancy to Napoleon III., whom she would probably have denounced if a tithe of his tyrannies had occurred in Italy, and the fancy became more emotional in after years.

A new edition of Mrs Browning's poems was called for in 1853, and at about this time, in Florence, she began to work on Aurora Leigh. She was still writing this poem when the Brownings were again in England, in 1855. Tennyson there read to them his newly-written Maud. After another interval in Paris they were in London again—Mrs Browning for the last time. She was with her dear cousin Kenyon during the last months of his life. In October 1856 the Brownings returned to their Florentine home, Mrs Browning leaving her completed Aurora Leigh for publication. The book had an immediate success; a second edition was required in a fortnight, a third a few months later. In the fourth edition (1859) several corrections were made. The review in Blackwood was written by W.E. Aytoun, that in the North British by Coventry Patmore.

In 1857 Mrs Browning addressed a petition, in the form of a letter, to the emperor Napoleon begging him to remit the sentence of exile upon Victor Hugo. We do not hear of any reply. In 1857 Mrs Browning's father died, unreconciled. Henrietta Barrett had married, like her sister, and like her was unforgiven. In 1858 occurred another visit to Paris, and another to Rome, where Hawthorne and his family were among the Brownings' friends. In 1859 came the Italian war in which Mrs Browning's hasty sympathies were hotly engaged. Her admiration of Italy's champion, Napoleon III., knew no bounds, and did not give way when, by the peace of Villafranca, Venice and Rome were left unannexed to the kingdom of Italy, and the French frontiers were "rectified" by the withdrawal from that kingdom of Savoy and Nice. That peace, however, was a bitter disappointment, and her fragile health suffered. At Siena and Florence this year the Brownings were very kind to Landor, old, solitary, and ill. Mrs Browning's poem, "A Tale of Villafranca", was published in the Athenaeum in September, and afterwards included in Poems before Congress (1860). Then followed another long visit to Rome, and there Mrs Browning prepared for the press this, her last volume. The little book was judged with some impatience, A Curse for a Nation being mistaken for a denunciation of England, whereas it was aimed at America and her slavery. The Athenaeum, amongst others, committed this error. The Saturday Review was hard on the volume, so was Blackwood; the Atlas and Daily News favourable. In July 1860 was published "A Musical Instrument" in the young Cornhill Magazine, edited by the author's friend W.M. Thackeray. The last blow she had to endure was the death of her sister Henrietta, in the same year.

On the 30th of June 1861 Elizabeth Barrett Browning died. Her husband, who tended her alone on the night of her decease, wrote to Miss Blagden: "Then came what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer—the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl's, and in a few minutes she died in my arms, her head on my cheek. ... There was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but God took her to himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark uneasy bed into your arms and the light. Thank God." Her married life had been supremely happy. Something has been said of the difference between husband and wife in regard to "spiritualism", in which Mrs Browning had interest and faith, but no division ever interrupted their entirely perfect affection and happiness. Of her husband's love for her she wrote at the time of her marriage, "He preferred ... of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfilment of the brightest dream which should exclude me in any possible world." "I am still doubtful whether all the brightness can be meant for me. It is just as if the sun rose again at 7 o'clock P.M." "I take it for pure magic, this life of mine. Surely nobody was ever so happy before." "I must say to you [Mrs Jameson] who saw the beginning with us, that this end of fifteen months is just fifteen times better and brighter; the mystical 'moon' growing larger and larger till scarcely room is left for any stars at all: the only differences which have touched me being the more and more happiness." Browning buried his wife in Florence, under a tomb designed by their friend Frederick Leighton. On the wall of Casa Guidi is placed the inscription: "Qui scrisse e mori Elisabetta Barrett Browning, che in cuore di donna conciliava scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta, e face del suo verso aureo annello fra Italia e Inghilterra. Pone questa lapide Firenze grata 1861." In 1866 Robert Browning published a volume of selections from his wife's works.

The place of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in English literature is high, if not upon the summits. She had an original genius, a fervent heart, and an intellect that was, if not great, exceedingly active. She seldom has composure or repose, but it is not true that her poetry is purely emotional. It is full of abundant, and even over-abundant, thoughts. It is intellectually restless. The impassioned peace of the greatest poetry, such as Wordsworth's, is not hers. Nor did she apparently seek to attain those heights. Her Greek training taught her little of the economy that such a poetic education is held to impose; she "dashed", not by reason of feminine weakness, but as it were to prove her possession of masculine strength. Her gentler work, as in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, is beyond praise. There is in her poetic personality a glory of righteousness, of spirituality, and of ardour that makes her name a splendid one in the history of an incomparable literature.

See the Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning addressed to R.H. Horne, with Comments on Contemporaries, edited by S.R. Townshend Mayer (2 vols., 1877); The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from 1826 to 1844, edited with memoir by J.H. Ingram (1887); Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Eminent Women series), by J.H. Ingram, 1888); Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and the Brownings, by Anne Ritchie (1892); The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited with biographical additions by Frederick G. Kenyon (2 vols., 1897); The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (2 vols., 1899); La Vie et l'œuvre d'Elizabeth Browning, by Mdlle. Germaine-Marie Merlette (Paris, 1906)

(A. Me.)

BROWNING, OSCAR (1837- ), English writer, was born in London on the 17th of January 1837, the son of a merchant, William Shipton Browning. He was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, of which he became fellow and tutor, graduating fourth in the classical tripos of 1860. He was for fifteen years a master at Eton College, resuming residence in 1876 at Cambridge, where he became university lecturer in history. He soon became a prominent figure in college and university life, encouraging especially the study of political science and modern political history, the extension of university teaching and the movement for the training of teachers. He is well known to Dante students by his Dante; Life and Works (1891), and to the study of Italian history he has contributed Guelphs and Ghibellines (1903). His works on modern history include England and Napoleon in 1803 (1887), History of England (4 vols. 1890), Wars of the Nineteenth Century (1899), History of Europe 1814-1843 (1901), Napoleon, the first Phase (1905).

BROWNING, ROBERT (1812-1889), English poet, was born at Camberwell, London, on the 7th of May 1812. He was the son of Robert Browning (1781-1866), who for fifty years was employed in the Bank of England. Earlier Brownings had been settled in Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, and there is no ground for the statement that the family was partly of Jewish origin. The poet's mother was a daughter of William Wiedemann, a German who had settled in Dundee and married a Scottish wife. His parents had one other child, a daughter, Sarianna, born in 1814. They lived quietly in Camberwell. The elder Browning had a sufficient income and was indifferent to money-making. He had strong literary and artistic tastes. He was an ardent book collector, and so good a draughtsman that paternal authority alone had prevented him from adopting an artistic career. He had, like his son, a singular faculty for versifying, and helped the boy's early lessons by twisting the Latin grammar into grotesque rhymes. He lived, as his father had done, to be 84, with unbroken health. The younger Robert inherited, along with other characteristics, much of his father's vigour of constitution. From the mother, who had delicate health, he probably derived his excessive nervous irritability; and from her, too, came his passion for music. The family was united by the strongest mutual affection, and the parents erred, if anything, on the side of indulgence. Browning was sent to a school in the neighbourhood, but left it when fourteen, and had little other teaching. He had a French tutor for the next two years, and in his eighteenth year he attended some Greek lectures at the London University. At school he never won a prize, though it was more difficult to avoid than to win prizes. He was more conspicuous for the love of birds and beasts, which he always retained, than for any interest in his lessons. He rather despised his companions and made few friends. A precocious poetical capacity, however, showed itself in extra-scholastic ways. He made his schoolfellows act plays, partly written by himself. He had composed verses before he could write, and when twelve years old completed a volume of poems called Incondita. His parents tried unsuccessfully to find a publisher; but his verses were admired by Sarah Flower, afterwards Mrs Adams, a well-known hymn-writer of the day, and by W.J. Fox, both of whom became valuable friends. A copy made by Miss Flower was in existence in 1871, but afterwards destroyed by the author. Browning had the run of his father's library, and acquired a very unusual amount of miscellaneous reading. Quarles' Emblems was an especial favourite; and besides the Elizabethan dramatists and standard English books, he had read all the works of Voltaire. Byron was his first master in poetry, but about the age of fourteen he fell in accidentally with Shelley and Keats. For Shelley in particular he conceived an enthusiastic admiration which lasted for many years, though it was qualified in his later life.

The more aggressive side of Browning's character was as yet the most prominent; and a self-willed lad, conscious of a growing ability, found himself cramped in Camberwell circles. He rejected the ordinary careers. He declined the offer of a clerkship in the Bank of England; and his father, who had found the occupation uncongenial, not only approved the refusal but cordially accepted the son's decision to take poetry for his profession. For good or evil, Browning had been left very much to his own guidance, and if his intellectual training suffered in some directions, the liberty permitted the development of his marked originality. The parental yoke, however, was too light to provoke rebellion. Browning's mental growth led to no violent breach with the creeds of his childhood. His parents became Dissenters in middle life, but often attended Anglican services; and Browning, though he abandoned the dogmas, continued to sympathize with the spirit of their creed. He never took a keen interest in the politics of the day, but cordially accepted the general position of contemporary Liberalism. His worship of Shelley did not mean an acceptance of his master's hostile attitude towards Christianity, still less did he revolt against the moral discipline under which he had been educated. He frequented literary and artistic circles, and was passionately fond of the theatre; but he was entirely free from a coarse Bohemianism, and never went to bed, we are told, without kissing his mother. He lived with his parents until his marriage. His mother lived till 1849, and his father till 1866, and his affectionate relations to both remained unaltered. Browning's first published poem, Pauline, appeared anonymously in 1833. He always regarded it as crude, and destroyed all the copies of this edition that came within his reach. It was only to avoid unauthorized reprints that he consented with reluctance to republishing it in the collected works of 1868. The indication of genius was recognized by W.J. Fox, who hailed it in the Monthly Repository as marking the advent of a true poet. Pauline contains an enthusiastic invocation of Shelley, whose influence upon its style and conception is strongly marked. It is the only one of Browning's works which can be regarded as imitative. In the winter of 1833 he went to St Petersburg on a visit to the Russian consul-general, Mr Benckhausen. There he wrote the earliest of his dramatic lyrics, "Porphyria's Lover" and "Johannes Agricola." In the spring of 1834 he visited Italy for the first time, going to Venice and Asolo.

Browning's personality was fully revealed in his next considerable poems, Paracelsus (1835) and Sordello (1840). With Pauline, however, they form a group. In an essay (prefixed to the spurious Shelley letters of 1851), Browning describes Shelley's poetry "as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity." The phrase describes his own view of the true functions of a poet, and Browning, having accepted the vocation, was meditating the qualifications which should fit him for his task. The hero of Pauline is in a morbid state of mind which endangers his fidelity to his duty. Paracelsus and Sordello are studies in the psychology of genius, illustrating its besetting temptations. Paracelsus fails from intellectual pride, not balanced by love of his kind, and from excessive ambition, which leads him to seek success by unworthy means. Sordello is a poet distracted between the demands of a dreamy imagination and the desire to utter the thoughts of mankind. He finally gives up poetry for practical politics, and gets into perplexities only to be solved by his death. Pauline might in some indefinite degree reflect Browning's own feelings, but in the later poems he adopts his characteristic method of speaking in a quasi-dramatic mood. They are, as he gave notice, "poems, not dramas." The interest is not in the external events, but in the "development of a soul"; but they are observations of other men's souls, not direct revelations of his own. Paracelsus was based upon a study of the original narrative, and Sordello was a historical though a very indefinite person. The background of history is intentionally vague in both cases. There is one remarkable difference between them. The Paracelsus, though full of noble passages, is certainly diffuse. Browning heard that John Sterling had complained of its "verbosity," and tried to remedy this failing by the surgical expedient of cutting out the usual connecting words. Relative pronouns henceforth become scarce in his poetry, and the grammatical construction often a matter of conjecture. Words are forcibly jammed together instead of being articulately combined. To the ordinary reader many passages in his later work are both crabbed and obscure, but the "obscurity" never afterwards reached the pitch of Sordello. It is due to the vagueness with which the story is rather hinted than told, as well as to the subtlety and intricacy of the psychological expositions. The subtlety and vigour of the thought are indeed surprising, and may justify the frequent comparisons to Shakespeare; and it abounds in descriptive passages of genuine poetry.

Still, Browning seems to have been misled by a fallacy. It was quite legitimate to subordinate the external incidents to the psychological development in which he was really interested, but to secure the subordination by making the incidents barely intelligible was not a logical consequence. We should not understand Hamlet's psychological peculiarities the better if we had to infer his family troubles from indirect hints. Browning gave more time to Sordello than to any other work, and perhaps had become so familiar with the story which he professed to tell that he failed to make allowance for his readers' difficulties. In any case it was not surprising that the ordinary reader should be puzzled and repelled, and the general recognition of his genius long delayed, by his reputation for obscurity.

It might, however, be expected that he would make a more successful appeal to the public by purely dramatic work, in which he would have to limit his psychological speculation and to place his characters in plain situations. Paracelsus and Sordello show so great a power of reading character and appreciating subtler springs of conduct that its author clearly had one, at least, of the essential qualifications of a dramatist.

Before Sordello appeared Browning had tried his hand in this direction. He was encouraged by outward circumstances as well as by his natural bent. He was making friends and gaining some real appreciative admirers. John Forster had been greatly impressed by Paracelsus. Browning's love of the theatre had led to an introduction to Macready in the winter of 1835-1836; and Macready, who had been also impressed by Paracelsus, asked him for a play. Browning consented and wrote Strafford, which was produced at Covent Garden in May 1837, Macready taking the principal part. Later dramas were King Victor and King Charles, published in 1842; The Return of the Druses and A Blot on the 'Scutcheon (both in 1843), Colombe's Birthday (1844), Luria and A Soul's Tragedy (both in 1846), and the fragmentary In a Balcony (1853). Strafford succeeded fairly, though the defection of Vandenhoff, who took the part of Pym, stopped its run after the fifth performance. The Blot on the 'Scutcheon, produced by Macready as manager of Drury Lane on the 11th of February 1843, led to an unfortunate quarrel. Browning thought that Macready had felt unworthy jealousy of another actor, and had gratified his spite by an inadequate presentation of the play. He remonstrated indignantly and the friendship was broken off for years. Browning was disgusted by his experience of the annoyances of practical play-writing, though he was not altogether discouraged. The play had apparently such a moderate success as was possible under the conditions, and a similar modest result was attained by Colombe's Birthday, produced at Covent Garden on the 25th of April 1853. Browning, like other eminent writers of the day, failed to achieve the feat of attracting the British public by dramas of high literary aims, and soon gave up the attempt. It has been said by competent critics that some of the plays could be fitted for the stage by judicious adaptation. The Blot on the 'Scutcheon has a very clear and forcibly treated situation; and all the plays abound in passages of high poetic power. Like the poems, they deal with situations involving a moral probation of the characters, and often suggesting the ethical problems which always interested him. The speeches tend to become elaborate analyses of motive by the persons concerned, and try the patience of an average audience. For whatever reason, Browning, though he had given sufficient proofs of genius, had not found in these works the most appropriate mode of utterance.

The dramas, after Strafford, formed the greatest part of a series of pamphlets called Bells and Pomegranates, eight of which were issued from 1841 to 1846. The name, he explained, was intended to indicate an "alternation of poetry and thought." The first number contained the fanciful and characteristic Pippa Passes. The seventh, significantly named Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, contained some of his most striking shorter poems. In 1844 he contributed six poems, among which were "The Flight of the Duchess" and "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St Praxed's Church," to Hood's Magazine, in order to help Hood, then in his last illness. These poems take the special form in which Browning is unrivalled. He wrote very few lyrical poems of the ordinary kind purporting to give a direct expression of his own personal emotions. But, in the lyric which gives the essential sentiment of some impressive dramatic situation, he has rarely been approached. There is scarcely one of the poems published at this time which can be read without fixing itself at once in the memory as a forcible and pungent presentation of a characteristic mood. Their vigour and originality failed to overcome at once the presumption against the author of Sordello. Yet Browning was already known to and appreciated by such literary celebrities of the day as Talfourd, Leigh Hunt, Procter, Monckton Milnes, Carlyle and Landor. His fame began to spread among sympathetic readers. The Bells and Pomegranates attracted the rising school of "pre-Raphaelites," especially D.G. Rossetti, who guessed the authorship of the anonymous Pauline and made a transcript from the copy in the British Museum. But his audience was still select.

Another recognition of his genius was of incomparably more personal importance and vitally affected his history. In 1844 Miss Barrett (see Browning, Elizabeth Barrett) published a volume of poems containing "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," with a striking phrase about Browning's poems. He was naturally gratified, and her special friend and cousin, John Kenyon, encouraged him to write to her. She admitted him to a personal interview after a little diffidence, and a hearty appreciation of literary genius on both sides was speedily ripened into genuine and most devoted love. Miss Barrett was six years older than Browning and a confirmed invalid with shaken nerves. She was tenderly attached to an autocratic father who objected on principle to the marriage of his children. The correspondence of the lovers (published in 1899) shows not only their mutual devotion, but the chivalrous delicacy with which Browning behaved in a most trying situation. Miss Barrett was gradually encouraged to disobey the utterly unreasonable despotism. They made a clandestine marriage on the 12th of September 1846. The state of Miss Barrett's health suggested misgivings which made Browning's parents as well as his bride's disapprove of the match. She, however, appears to have become stronger for some time, though always fragile and incapable of much active exertion. She had already been recommended to pass a winter in Italy. Browning had made three previous tours there, and his impressions had been turned to account in Sordello and Pippa Passes, in The Englishman in Italy and Home Thoughts from Abroad. For the next fifteen years the Brownings lived mainly in Italy, making their headquarters at Florence in the Casa Guidi. A couple of winters were passed in Rome. In the summer of 1849 they were at Siena, where Browning was helpful to Landor, then in his last domestic troubles. They also visited England and twice spent some months in Paris. Their only child, Robert Wiedemann Browning, was born at Florence in 1849. Browning's literary activity during his marriage seems to have been comparatively small; Christmas Eve and Easter Day appeared in 1850, while the two volumes called Men and Women (1855), containing some of his best work, showed that his power was still growing. His position involved some sacrifice and imposed limitations upon his energies. Mrs Browning's health required a secluded life; and Browning, it is said, never dined out during his marriage, though he enjoyed society and made many and very warm friendships. Among their Florence friends were Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Isa Blagden, Charles Lever and others. The only breach of complete sympathy with his wife was due to his contempt for "spiritualists" and "mediums," in whom she fully believed. His portrait of Daniel Dunglas Home as "Sludge the Medium" only appeared after her death. This domestic happiness, however, remained essentially unbroken until she died on 29th June 1861. The whole love-story had revealed the singular nobility of his character, and, though crushed for a time by the blow, he bore it manfully. Browning determined to return to England and superintend his boy's education at home. He took a house at 19 Warwick Crescent, Paddington, and became gradually acclimatized in London. He resumed his work and published the Dramatis Personae in 1864. The publication was well enough received to mark the growing recognition of his genius, which was confirmed by The Ring and the Book, published in four volumes in the winter of 1868-1869. In 1867 the university of Oxford gave him the degree of M.A. "by diploma," and Balliol College elected him as an honorary fellow. In 1868 he declined a virtual offer of the rectorship of St Andrews. He repeated the refusal on a later occasion (1884) from a dislike to the delivery of a public address. The rising generation was now beginning to buy his books; and he shared the homage of thoughtful readers with Tennyson, though in general popularity he could not approach his friendly rival. The Ring and the Book has been generally accepted as Browning's masterpiece. It was based on a copy of the procès verbal of Guido Franceschini's case discovered by him at Florence.

The audacity of the scheme is surprising. To tell the story of a hideous murder twelve times over, to versify the arguments of counsel and the gossip of quidnuncs, and to insist upon every detail with the minuteness of a law report, could have occurred to no one else. The poem is so far at the opposite pole from Sordello. Vagueness of environment is replaced by a photographic distinctness, though the psychological interest is dominant in both. Particular phrases may be crabbed, but nothing can be more distinct and vivid in thought and conception. If some of those "dramatic monologues" of which the book is formed fail to be poetry at all, some of them—that of Pompilia the victim, her champion Caponsacchi, and the pope who gives judgment—are in Browning's highest mood, and are as impressive from the ethical as from the poetical point of view. Pompilia was no doubt in some respects an idealized portrait of Mrs Browning. Other pieces may be accepted as a background of commonplace to throw the heroic into the stronger relief. The Ring and the Book is as powerful as its method is unique.

Browning became gentler and more urbane as he grew older. His growing fame made him welcome in all cultivated circles, and he accepted the homage of his admirers with dignity and simplicity. He exerted himself to be agreeable in private society, though his nervousness made him invariably decline ever to make public speeches. He was an admirable talker, and took pains to talk his best. A strong memory supplied him with abundant anecdotes; and though occasionally pugnacious, he allowed a fair share of the conversation to his companions. Superficial observers sometimes fancied that the poet was too much sunk in the man of the world; but the appearance was due to his characteristic reluctance to lay bare his deeper feelings. When due occasion offered, the underlying tenderness of his affections was abundantly manifest. No one could show more delicate sympathy. He made many warm personal friendships in his later years, especially with women, to whom he could most easily confide his feelings. In the early years of this period he paid visits to country houses, but afterwards preferred to retire farther from the London atmosphere into secluded regions. He passed some holidays in remote French villages, Pornic, Le Croisic and St Aubyn, which have left traces in his poetry. Gold Hair is a legend of Pornic, and Hervé Riel was written at Le Croisic. At St Aubyn he had the society of Joseph Milsand, who had shown his warm appreciation of Browning's poetry by an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, which in 1852 had led to a personal friendship lasting till Milsand's death in 1886. Browning sent to him the proof-sheets of all his later works for revision. In 1877 Browning was at La Saisiaz on the Salève, near Geneva, where an old friend, Miss Egerton Smith, was staying. She died suddenly almost in his presence. She had constantly accompanied him to concerts during his London life. After her death he almost ceased to care for music. The shock of her loss produced the singular poem called La Saisiaz, in which he argues the problem of personal immortality with a rather indefinite conclusion. In later years Browning returned to Italy, and passed several autumns at Venice. He never visited Florence after his wife's death there.

Browning's literary activity continued till almost the end of his life. He wrote constantly, though he composed more slowly. He considered twenty-five or thirty lines to be a good day's work. His later writings covered a very great variety of subjects, and were cast in many different forms. They show the old characteristics and often the old genius. Browning's marked peculiarity, the union of great speculative acuteness with intense poetical insight, involved difficulties which he did not always surmount. He does not seem to know whether he is writing poetry or when he is versifying logic; and when the speculative impulse gets the upper hand, his work suggests the doubt whether an imaginary dialogue in prose would not have been a more effective medium. He is analysing at length when he ought to be presenting a concrete type, while the necessities of verse complicate and obscure the reasoning. A curious example is the Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), an alias for Louis Napoleon. The attempt to show how a questionable hero apologizes to himself recalls the very powerful "Bishop Blougram," and "Sludge, the medium," of earlier works, but becomes prolix and obscure. Fifine at the Fair (1872) is another curious speculation containing a defence of versatility in lovemaking by an imaginary Don Juan. Its occasionally cynical tone rather scandalized admirers, who scarcely made due allowance for its dramatic character. Browning's profound appreciation of high moral qualities is, however, always one main source of his power. In later years he became especially interested in stories of real life, which show character passing through some sharp ordeal. The Red Cotton Nightcap Country (1873), describing a strange tragedy which had recently taken place in France, and especially The Inn Album (1875), founded on an event in modern English society, are powerful applications of the methods already exemplified in The Ring and the Book. The Dramatic Idyls (1879 and 1880) are a collection of direct narratives, with less analytical disquisition, which surprised his readers by their sustained vigour. In the last volumes, Jocoseria (1883), Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), Parleying with Certain People (1887) and Asolando (1889), the old power is still apparent but the hand is beginning to fail. They contain discussions of metaphysical problems, such as the origin of evil, which are interesting as indications of his creed, but can scarcely be regarded as successful either poetically or philosophically.

Another group of poems showed Browning's interest in Greek literature. Balaustion's Adventure (1871) includes a "transcript from Euripides," a translation, that is, of part of the Alcestis. Aristophanes' Apology (1875) included another translation from the Heracles, and in 1877 he published a very literal translation of the Agamemnon. This, it seems, was meant to disprove the doctrine that Æschylus was a model of literary style. Browning shared his wife's admiration for Euripides, and takes a phrase from one of her poems as a motto for Balaustion's Adventure. In the Aristophanes' Apology this leads characteristically to a long exposition by Aristophanes of his unsatisfactory reasons for ridiculing Euripides. It recalls the apologies of "Blougram" and Louis Napoleon, and contains some interesting indications of his poetical theory. Browning was to many readers as much prophet as poet. His religious position is most explicitly, though still not very clearly, set forth in the Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850). Like many eminent contemporaries, he combined a disbelief in orthodox dogma with a profound conviction of the importance to the religious instincts of the symbols incorporated in accepted creeds. Saul (1845), A Death in the Desert (1864), and similar poems, show his strong sympathy with the spirit of the old belief, though his argumentative works have a more or less sceptical turn. It was scarcely possible, if desirable, to be original on such topics. His admirers hold that he shows an affinity to German metaphysicians, though he had never read their works nor made any express study of metaphysical questions. His distinctive tendency is to be found rather in the doctrine of life and conduct which both suggests and is illustrated by his psychological analyses. A very characteristic thought emphatically set forth in the Rabbi Ben Ezra (1864) and the Grammarian's Funeral (1855) is that a man's value is to be measured, not by the work done, but by the character which has been moulded. He delights in exhibiting the high moral instinct which dares to override ordinary convictions, or which is content with discharge of obscure duties, or superior to vulgar ambition and capable of self-sacrifice, because founded upon pure love and sympathy for human suffering. Browning's limitations are characteristic of the poetry of strong ethical preoccupations. His strong idiosyncrasy, his sympathy with the heroic and hatred of the base, was hardly to be combined with the Shakespearian capacity for sympathizing with the most varied types of character. Though he deals with a great variety of motive with singularly keen analysis, he takes almost exclusively the moral point of view. That point of view, however, has its importance, and his morality is often embodied in poetry of surpassing force. Browning's love of the grotesque, sometimes even of the horrible, creates many most graphic and indelible portraits. The absence of an exquisite sense for the right word is compensated by the singular power of striking the most brilliant flashes out of obviously wrong words, and forcing comic rhymes to express the deepest and most serious thoughts. Though he professed to care little for motive as apart from human interest, his incidental touches of description are unsurpassably vivid.

The appreciation of Browning's genius became general in his later years, and zeal was perhaps a little heightened by the complacency of disciples able to penetrate a supposed mist of obscurity. The Browning Society, founded in 1881 by Dr F.J. Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey, was a product of this appreciation, and helped to extend the study of the poems. Browning accepted the homage in a simple and friendly way, though he avoided any action which would make him responsible for the publications. He received various honours: LL.D. degree from Cambridge in 1879, the D.C.L. from Oxford in 1882, and LL.D. from Edinburgh in 1884. He became foreign correspondent to the Royal Academy in 1886. His son, who had settled at Venice, married in 1887, and Browning moved to De Vere Gardens. In the autumn of 1889 he went with his sister to visit his son, and stayed on the way at Asolo, which he had first seen in 1838, when it supplied the scenery of Pippa Passes. He was charmed with the place, and proposed to buy a piece of ground and to build upon it a house to be called "Pippa's Tower"—in memory of his early heroine. While his proposal was under consideration he went to his son at Venice. His health had been breaking for some time, and a cold, aggravated by weakness of the heart, brought on a fatal attack. He died on the 12th of December 1889. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 31st December. It was suggested that his wife's body should be removed from Florence to be placed beside him; but their son rightly decided that her grave should not be disturbed.

Browning's personal characteristics are so strongly stamped upon all his works that it is difficult to assign his place in contemporary thought. He is unique and outside of all schools. His style is so peculiar that he is the easiest of all poets to parody and the most dangerous to imitate. In spite of his early Shelley worship he is in certain respects more closely related to Wordsworth. Both of them started by accepting the poet's mission as quasi-prophetical or ethical. In other respects they are diametrically contrasted. Wordsworth expounded his philosophy by writing a poetical autobiography. Browning adheres to the dramatic method of which Wordsworth was utterly incapable. He often protested against the supposition that he put himself into his books. Yet there is no writer whose books seem to readers to be clearer revelations of himself. Nothing, in fact, is more characteristic of a man than his judgments of other men, and Browning's are keen and unequivocal. The revolutionary impulse had died out, and Browning has little to say either of the political questions which had moved Shelley and Byron, or of the social problems which have lately become more prominent. He represents the thought of a quieter epoch. He was little interested, too, in the historical or "romantic" aspect of life. He takes his subjects from a great variety of scenes and places—from ancient Greece, medieval Italy and modern France and England; but the interest for him is not in the picturesque surroundings, but in the human being who is to be found in all periods. Like Balzac, whom he always greatly admired, he is interested in the eternal tragedy and comedy of life. His problem is always to show what are the really noble elements which are eternally valuable in spite of failure to achieve tangible results. He gives, so far, another version of Wordsworth's doctrine of the cultivation of the "moral being." The psychological acuteness and the subtle analysis of character are, indeed, peculiar to himself. Like Carlyle, with whom he had certain points of affinity, he protests, though rather by implication than direct denunciation, against the utilitarian or materialistic view of life, and finds the divine element in the instincts which guide and animate every noble character. When he is really inspired by sympathy for such emotions he can make his most grotesque fancies and his most far-fetched analyses subservient to poetry of the highest order. It can hardly be denied that his intellectual ingenuity often tempts him to deviate from his true function, and that his observations are not to be excused because they result from an excess, instead of a deficiency, of intellectual acuteness. But the variety of his interests—aesthetic, philosophical and ethical—is astonishing, and his successes are poems which stand out as unique and unsurpassable in the literature of his time.

The Life and Letters of Browning, by Mrs Sutherland Orr (1891), one of his most intimate friends in later years, and The Love Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845-1846, published by his son in 1899, are the main authorities. A collection of Browning's poems in 2 vols. appeared in 1849, another in 3 vols. in 1863, another in 6 vols. in 1868, and a revised edition in 16 vols. in 1888-1889; in 1896 Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr F.G. Kenyon edited a complete edition in 2 vols.; another two-volume edition was issued by Messrs Smith, Elder in 1900. Among commentaries on Browning's works, Mrs Sutherland Orr's Handbook to the Works of Browning was approved by the poet himself. See also the Browning Society's Papers; and Mr T.J. Wise's Materials for a Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning, included in the Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century (1895), by W. Robertson Nicoll and T.J. Wise; Mr. Edmund Gosse's Robert Browning: Personalia (1890), from notes supplied by Browning himself. Among biographical and critical authorities may be mentioned: J.T. Nettleship, Essays (1868); Arthur Symons, An Introduction to the Study of Browning (1886); Stopford Brooke, The Poetry of Robert Browning (1902); G.K. Chesterton, Browning (1908) in the "English Men of Letters" series.

(L. S.)

BROWN-SÉQUARD, CHARLES EDWARD (1817-1894), British physiologist and neurologist, was born at Port Louis, Mauritius, on the 8th of April 1817. His father was an American and his mother a Frenchwoman, but he himself always desired to be looked upon as a British subject, though in the restlessness of his life and the enthusiasm of his disposition, characteristics of his mother's nation were plainly visible. After graduating in medicine at Paris in 1846 he returned to Mauritius with the intention of practising there, but in 1852 he went to America. Subsequently he returned to Paris, and in 1859 he migrated to London, becoming physician to the national hospital for the paralysed and epileptic. There he stayed for about five years, expounding his views on the pathology of the nervous system in numerous lectures which attracted considerable attention. In 1864 he again crossed the Atlantic, and was appointed professor of physiology and neuro-pathology at Harvard. This position he relinquished in 1867, and in 1869 became professor at the École de Médecine in Paris, but in 1873 he again returned to America and began to practise in New York. Finally, he went back to Paris to succeed Claude Bernard in 1878 as professor of experimental medicine in the Collège de France, and he remained there till his death, which occurred on the 2nd of April 1894 at Sceaux. Brown-Séquard was a keen observer and experimentalist. He contributed largely to our knowledge of the blood and animal heat, as well as many facts of the highest importance on the nervous system. He was the first scientist to work out the physiology of the spinal cord, demonstrating that the decussation of the sensory fibres is in the cord itself. He also did valuable work on the internal secretion of organs, the results of which have been applied with the most satisfactory results in the treatment of myxoedema. Unfortunately in his extreme old age, he advocated the hypodermic injection of a fluid prepared from the testicles of sheep, as a means of prolonging human life. It was known, among scientists, derisively, as the Brown-Séquard Elixir. His researches, published in about 500 essays and papers, especially in the Archives de Physiologie, which he helped to found in 1868, cover a very wide range of physiological and pathological subjects.

BROWNSON, ORESTES AUGUSTUS (1803-1876), American theological, philosophical and sociological writer, was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, on the 16th of September 1803. Having spent some time in active religious, reformatory and political (Democratic) work in the interior of New York state, and at Walpole, New Hampshire, and Canton, Massachusetts, Brownson removed in 1839 to Chelsea, Mass. He at once began to take an independent part in the movements then agitating New England, which between 1830 and 1850 was stirred by discussions pertaining to Unitarianism, transcendentalism, spiritualism, abolitionism and various schemes for communistic living. He was one of the founders, in New York, of the short-lived Workingman's party in 1828, and established the Boston Quarterly Review, mainly written by himself, in 1838. This periodical was merged in the U.S. Democratic Review of New York in 1842. In religion he first became a Presbyterian (1822); was a Universalist minister from 1826 to 1831, editing for some time the chief journal of this church, the Gospel Advocate; was an independent preacher at Ithaca, N.Y., in 1831; became a Unitarian minister in 1832, and in 1836 organized in Boston the Society for Christian Union and Progress, of which he was the pastor for seven years. In 1844 he became a Roman Catholic and so remained, though the question of the orthodoxy of his writings was at one time submitted by the pope to Cardinal Franzelin, who recommended Brownson, to little purpose, to express his views with more moderation. In his philosophy Brownson was a more or less independent follower of Comte for a short time, and of Victor Cousin, who, in his Fragmens philosophiques, praised him; he may be said to have taught a modified intuitionalism. In his schemes for social reform he was at first a student of Robert Owen, until his later views led him to accept Roman Catholicism. His first quarterly was followed, in 1844, by Brownson's Quarterly Review (first published in Boston and after 1855 in New York), in which he expressed his opinions on many themes until its suspension in 1864, and after its revival for a brief period in 1873-1875. Of his numerous publications in book form, the chief during his lifetime were Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted (1840, autobiographical), in which he strongly favoured the Roman Catholic Church; and The American Republic: its Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny (1865), in which he based government on ethics, declaring the national existence to be a moral and even a theocratic entity, not depending for validity upon the sovereignty of the people. Brownson died in Detroit, Michigan, on the 17th of April 1876.

After his death, his son, Henry F. Brownson, collected and published his various political, religious, philosophical, scientific and literary writings, in twenty octavo volumes (Detroit, 1883-1887), of which a condensed summary appeared in a single volume, also prepared by his son, entitled Literary and Political Views (New York, 1893). The son also published a biography in three volumes (Detroit, 1898-1900).

His daughter, Sarah M. Brownson (1839-1876), who married in 1873 William J. Tenney, was the author of several novels, and wrote a Life of Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, Prince and Priest (1873).

BROWNSVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Cameron county, Texas, U.S.A., situated near the S. extremity of the state, on the Rio Grande river about 22 m. above its mouth, and opposite Matamoras, Mexico. Pop. (1890) 6134; (1900) 6305, including 2462 foreign-born and 18 negroes; (1910) 10,517. It is served by the St Louis, Brownsville & Mexico, and the Rio Grande railways, being connected by the former with Houston and Galveston and by the latter with Point Isabel on the Gulf coast. Its chief importance lies in its being the commercial and distributing centre for a rich and extensive agricultural region in southern Texas and northern Mexico, and an important market for rice, sugar-cane, fruit, vegetables and live-stock. It has a United States custom house, the Cameron county court house, a Roman Catholic cathedral, St Joseph's College (Roman Catholic), and the Incarnate Word Academy (Roman Catholic). Before the Mexican War there was a small Mexican settlement on the site of Brownsville. In March 1846 General Zachary Taylor erected fortifications here, and upon his withdrawal to Point Isabel, left a small garrison in command of Major Jacob Brown. The fort was assaulted by General Arista and shelled by batteries from the Mexican shore, and at last on the 10th of May was relieved by General Taylor, who in advancing to its aid had won the battles of Palo Alto (8th of May) and Resaca de la Palma (9th of May). The fort, originally named Fort Taylor, was renamed Fort Brown, by order of General Taylor, in memory of Major Brown, who was mortally wounded during the bombardment. In 1859 Brownsville was captured by a band of Mexican raiders under Juan Nepomuceno Cortina. During the Civil War, until its temporary occupation by Federal forces in 1863, and subsequent effective blockade, it was an active centre of operations of Confederate blockade runners. At Palmetto Ranch, near the battlefield of Palo Alto, took place (13th of May 1865), more than a month after General Lee's surrender, the last engagement between Federal and Confederate troops in the Civil War. In Brownsville, on the night of the 13th of August 1906, certain persons unknown fired into houses and at citizens on the streets, killing one man and injuring two. Suspicion pointed to negro soldiers of Companies B, C and D of the 25th Infantry, stationed at Fort Brown, and as it appeared that the culprits were being shielded by their comrades by a "conspiracy of silence," President Roosevelt dismissed the 170 men of the three companies "without honor." Both in Congress and in the press a bitter attack was made on the president for his action. In 1907 the military reservation of Fort Brown was transferred to the Department of Agriculture. In March 1909 Congress provided for a commission of army officers to report as to the eligibility of members of the negro regiments for re-enlistment.

BRUAY, a town of northern France, in the department of Pas-de-Calais, on the Lawe, 19 m. N.N.W. of Arras by road. Pop. (1906) 16,169. The town is situated in a rich coal-mining district. Brewing is also a leading industry.

BRUCE, the name of an old Scottish family of Norman descent, taken from Bruis between Cherbourg and Vallonges. Variations of the name are Braose, Breaux and Brus. The first Robert de Brus, a follower of William the Conqueror, was rewarded by the gift of many manors, chiefly in Yorkshire, of which Skelton was the principal. His son, the second Robert, received from David I., his comrade at the court of Henry I., a grant of the lordship of Annandale. The fourth Robert married Isabel, natural daughter of William the Lion, and their son, the fifth Robert, married Isabel, second daughter of David, earl of Huntingdon, niece of the same Scottish king. The most famous member of the family is the eighth Robert, "the Bruce," who became king of Scotland in 1306. (See Robert the Bruce.)

BRUCE, ALEXANDER BALMAIN (1831-1899), Scottish divine, was born at Aberargie near Perth on the 31st of January 1831. His father suffered for his adherence to the Free Church at the Disruption in 1843, and removed to Edinburgh, where the son was educated, showing exceptional ability from the first. His early religious doubts, awakened especially by Strauss's Life of Jesus, made him throughout life sympathetic with those who underwent a similar stress. After serving as assistant first at Ancrum, then at Lochwinnoch, he was called to Cardross in Dumbartonshire in 1859, and to Broughty Ferry in 1868. There he published his first considerable exegetical work, the Training of the Twelve. In 1874 he delivered his Cunningham Lectures, afterwards published as The Humiliation of Christ, and in the following year was appointed to the chair of Apologetics and New Testament exegesis at the Free Church College, Glasgow. This post he held for twenty-four years. He was one of the first British New Testament students whose work was received with consideration by German scholars of repute. The character and work of Christ were, he held, the ultimate proof and the best defence of Christianity; and his tendency was to concentrate attention somewhat narrowly on the historic Jesus. In The Kingdom of God (1889), which first encountered serious hostile criticism in his own communion, he accounted for some of the differences between the first and third evangelists on the principle of accommodation—maintaining that Luke had altered both the text and the spirit of his sources to suit the needs of those for whom he wrote. It was held that these admissions were not consistent with the views of inspiration professed by the Free Church. When the case was tried, the assembly held that the charge of heresy was based on a misunderstanding, but that "by want of due care in his mode of statement he had given some ground for the painful impressions which had existed."

Bruce rendered signal service to his own communion in connexion with its service of praise. He was convener of the committee which issued the Free Church hymn book, and he threw into this work the same energy and catholicity of mind which marked the rest of his activities. He died on the 7th of August 1899, and was buried at Broughty Ferry. His chief works, beside the above, are: The Chief End of Revelation (Lond., 1881); The Parabolic Teaching of Christ (Lond., 1882); F.C. Baur and his Theory of the Origin of Christianity and of the New Testament Writings in "Present Day Tracts" (Lond., 1885); Apologetics, or Christianity Defensively Stated (Edin., 1892); St Paul's Conception of Christianity (Lond., 1894); Expos. Gk. Test. (the Synoptic Gospels, Lond., 1897). With Open Face (Lond., 1896); The Epistle to the Hebrews (Edin., 1899); The Providential Order of the World, and the Moral Order of the World in Ancient and Modern Thought (Gifford Lectures, 1896-1897; Lond., 1897, 1899).

(D. Mn.)

BRUCE, JAMES (1730-1794), Scottish explorer in Africa, was born at Kinnaird House, Stirlingshire, on the 14th of December 1730. He was educated at Harrow and Edinburgh University, and began to study for the bar; but his marriage to the daughter of a wine merchant resulted in his entering that business. His wife died in October 1754, within nine months of marriage, and Bruce thereafter travelled in Portugal and Spain. The examination of oriental MSS. at the Escurial led him to the study of Arabic and Geez and determined his future career. In 1758 his father's death placed him in possession of the estate of Kinnaird. On the outbreak of war with Spain in 1762 he submitted to the British government a plan for an attack on Ferrol. His suggestion was not adopted, but it led to his selection by the 2nd earl of Halifax for the post of British consul at Algiers, with a commission to study the ancient ruins in that country, in which interest had been excited by the descriptions sent home by Thomas Shaw (1694-1751), consular chaplain at Algiers, 1719-1731. Having spent six months in Italy studying antiquities, Bruce reached Algiers in March 1763. The whole of his time was taken up with his consular duties at the piratical court of the dey, and he was kept without the assistance promised. But in August 1765, a successor in the consulate having arrived, Bruce began his exploration of the Roman ruins in Barbary. Having examined many ruins in eastern Algeria, he travelled by land from Tunis to Tripoli, and at Ptolemeta took passage for Candia; but was shipwrecked near Bengazi and had to swim ashore. He eventually reached Crete, and sailing thence to Sidon, travelled through Syria, visiting Palmyra and Baalbek. Throughout his journeyings in Barbary and the Levant, Bruce made careful drawings of the many ruins he examined. He also acquired a sufficient knowledge of medicine to enable him to pass in the East as a physician.

In June 1768 he arrived at Alexandria, having resolved to endeavour to discover the source of the Nile, which he believed to rise in Abyssinia. At Cairo he gained the support of the Mameluke ruler, Ali Bey; after visiting Thebes he crossed the desert to Kosseir, where he embarked in the dress of a Turkish sailor. He reached Jidda in May 1769, and after some stay in Arabia he recrossed the Red Sea and landed at Massawa, then in possession of the Turks, on the 19th of September. He reached Gondar, then the capital of Abyssinia, on the 14th of February 1770, where he was well received by the negus Tekla Haimanot II., by Ras Michael, the real ruler of the country, by the ras's wife, Ozoro Esther, and by the Abyssinians generally. His fine presence (he was 6 ft. 4 in. high), his knowledge of Geez, his excellence in sports, his courage, resource and self-esteem, all told in his favour among a people who were in general distrustful of all foreigners. He stayed in Abyssinia for two years, gaining knowledge which enabled him subsequently to present a perfect picture of Abyssinian life. On the 14th of November 1770 he reached the long-sought source of the Blue Nile. Though admitting that the White Nile was the larger stream, Bruce claimed that the Blue Nile was the Nile of the ancients and that he was thus the discoverer of its source. The claim, however, was not well founded (see Nile: Story of Exploration). Setting out from Gondar in December 1771, Bruce made his way, in spite of enormous difficulties, by Sennar to Nubia, being the first to trace the Blue Nile to its confluence with the White Nile. On the 29th of November 1772 he reached Assuan, presently returning to the desert to recover his journals and his baggage, which had been abandoned in consequence of the death of all his camels. Cairo was reached in January 1773, and in March Bruce arrived in France, where he was welcomed by Buffon and other savants. He came to London in 1774, but, offended by the incredulity with which his story was received, retired to his home at Kinnaird. It was not until 1790 that, urged by his friend Daines Barrington, he published his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768-73, in five octavo volumes, lavishly illustrated. The work was very popular, but was assailed by other travellers as being unworthy of credence. The manner in which the book was written—twelve years after Bruce's return from Africa and without reference to his journals—gave some handle to his critics, but the substantial accuracy of every statement concerning his Abyssinian travels has since been amply demonstrated. He died on the 27th of April 1794.

Bruce wrote an autobiography, part of which is printed in editions of his Travels, published in 1805 and 1813, accompanied by a biographical notice by the editor, Alexander Murray. The best edition of the Travels is the third (Edinburgh, 1813, 8 vols.). Of the abridgments the best is that of Major (afterwards Sir Francis) Head, the author of a well-informed Life of Bruce (London, 1830). The best account of Bruce's travels in Barbary is contained in Sir R. Lambert Playfair's Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce (London, 1877), in which a selection of his drawings was published for the first time. Several of Bruce's drawings were presented to George III. and are in the royal collection at Windsor.

Dr Shaw's Travels relating to Several Parts of Barbary ... was first printed at Oxford (1738).