DR. THOMAS BROWN AND DR. ERASMUS DARWIN. 29 



behaviour. In no one of these in no one relation of 

 life, whether external or internal, was he ever otherwise. 

 Sneerers might find in him " an affected politeness " and 

 a vein in his conversational pleasantry that lacked 

 freedom ; but always and everywhere he made the best 

 men around him friends. More than one of these have 

 left it on record that they regarded him " as a man of 

 the most perfect worth." And these men, moreover, 

 were the best men of his time, a Gregory, a Playfair, 

 a Leslie, a Stewart. Nor was it any drawback to his 

 modesty, that he always added to it Anstand (propriety 

 of pose). With all his " amiableness," his " evenness of 

 temper," " his mild and gentlemanly manners," " he al- 

 ways consulted the dignity of his own character, and 

 never allowed any one to treat him with disrespect." In 

 his own day, doubtless, he was received only with the 

 enthusiastic plaudits of his students and the most natter- 

 ing consideration on the part of all around him ; but he 

 never knew what an authority in philosophy he was to 

 become for the public never dreamed that these Lectures 

 of his, without the benefit of " his last corrections," " not 

 prepared for the press," but only " for the purpose of 

 academical instruction," " the subject of many of them 

 never reflected upon till he took up his pen," and " many 

 of his theories occurring to him during the period of 

 composition " never dreamed that now, well on for a 

 century after his death, the nineteenth edition of them 

 should be the current copy in the hands of those who 

 read. In his own day this was not so. " As an author," 

 his biographer laments, " his fate has been singular, and, 

 during his own lifetime, hard. None of his works, while 

 lie was alive, ever attained any great popularity ; and, in 

 the reviews of the day, the name of Dr. Brown is almost 

 the only one of any celebrity that is never to be found." 

 As regards his philosophy, however, this is not to be won- 



