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In 1753, having gone through every preparatory course of study, he took the degree of M. A. and had now technically finished his education. Having hitherto been supported by the generous kindness of an elder brother, he wished to exonerate his family from any further burden. With this laudable view, there being a vacancy for the office of school-master and parish-clerk to the parish of Fordoun, adjoining to Laurencekirk, he accepted the appointment, August 1, 1753; but this was neither suited to his disposition, nor advantageous to his progress in life. He obtained in this place, however, a few friends, particularly lord Gardenstown and lord Monboddo, who honoured him with encouraging notice; and his imagination was delighted by the beautiful and sublime scenery of the place, which he appears to have contemplated with the eye of a poet. His leisure hours he employed on some poetical attempts, which, as they were published in the “Scots Magazine,” with his initials, and sometimes with his place of abode, must have contributed to make him yet better known and respected.

, a Scotch artist, the son of a goldsmith and watchmaker, was born in 1752 at Edinburgh, and was early destined to take up the profession of a painter. He travelled into Italy in 1771, and durmg the course of ten years residence there, the pencil and crayon were ever in his hand, and the sublime thoughts of Raphael and Michael Angelo ever in his imagination. By continual practice he obtained a correctness and elegance of contour, rarely surpassed by any British artist, but he unfortunately neglected the mechanism of the pallet till his taste was so refined that Titian, and Murillo, and Correggio made his heart to sink within him when he touched the canvass. When he attempted to lay in his colours, the admirable correctness of his contour was lost, and he had not self-sufficiency to persevere till it should be recovered in that tender evanescent outline which is so difficult to be attained even by the most eminent painters. At Rome he met with sir William Young and Mr. Townley; who, pleased with some very beautiful drawings done by him in pen and ink, took him with them, as a draftsman, into Sicily. Of the antiquities of this celebrated island he took several very fine views in pen and ink, exquisitely finished, yet still preserving the character and spirit of the buildings he intended to represent. He returned some years afterwards from Italy to his native town, where he was much beloved and esteemed, his conversation being extremely acute and entertaining on most subjects, but peculiarly so on those of art; and his knowledge of music 'being very great, and his taste in it extremely just and refined. Lord Monboddo gave him a general invitation to his elegant and convivial table, and employed him ip, making several drawings in pencil for him. Mr. Brown, however, in 1786, came to London, and was caressed by scholars and men of taste in that metropolis, where he was very much employed as a painter of small portraits in black lead pencil, which were always correctly drawn, and exhibited, with a picturesque fidelity, the features and character of the person who sat to him.:

Mr. Brown was not only known as an exquisite drafts.­man, he was also a good philosopher, a sound scholar, and endowed with a just and refined taste in all the liberal and polite arts, and a man of consummate worth and integrity. Soon after his death his “Letters on the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera,” 12mo, were published. They were originally written to his friend lord Monboddo, who wished to have Mr. Brown’s opinion on those subjects, which have so intimate a connection with his work on the Origin and Progress of Language; and who was so pleased with the style and observations contained in them, that he wrote an introduction, which was published with them, in one volume, 12mo, 1789, for the benefit of his widow. The letters, written with great elegance and perspicuity, are certainly the production of a strong and fervid mind, acquainted with the subject; and must be useful to most of the frequenters of the Italian opera, by enabling them to understand the reasons on which the pleasure they receive at that musical performance is founded, a knowledge in which they are generally very deficient. Not being written for publication, they have that spirit and simplicity which every man of genius diffuses through any subject which he communicates in confidence, and which he is but too apt to refine away when he sits down to compose a work for the public. Lord Monboddo, in the fourth volume of the Origin and Progress of Language, speaking of Mr. Brown, says, “The account that I have given of the Italian language is taken from one who resided above ten years in Italy; and who, besides understanding the language perfectly, is more learned in the Italian arts of painting, sculpture, music, and poetry, than any man I ever met with. His natural good taste he has improved by the study of the monuments of ancient art, to be seen at Rome and Florence; and as beauty in all the arts is pretty much the same, consisting of grandeur and simplicity, variety, decorum, and a suitableness to the subject, I think he is a good judge of language, and of writing, as well as of painting, sculpture, and music.” A very well-written character in Latin, by an advocate of Edinburgh, is appended to the Letters. Mr. Brown left behind him several very highly-finished portraits in pencil, and many very exquisite sketches in pencil and in pen and ink, which he had taken of persons and of places in Italy; particularly a book of studies of heads, taken from the life, an inestimable treasure to any history painter, as a common-place book for his pictures, the heads it contained being all of them Italian ones, of great expression, or of high character. He was so enraptured with his art, and so assiduous in the pursuit of it, that he suffered no countenance of beauty, grace, dignity, or expression, to pass him unnoticed; and to be enabled to possess merely a sketch for himself, of any subject that struck his fancy, he would make a present of a high-finished drawing to the person who permitted his head to be taken by him. The characteristics of his hancl were delicacy, correctness, and taste, as the drawings he made from many of Mr. Townley’s best statues very plainly evince. Of his mind, the leading features were acuteness, liberality, and sensibility, joined to a character firm, vigorous, and energetic. The last efforts of this ingenious artist were employed in making two very exquisite drawings, the one from Mr. Townley’s celebrated bust of Homer, the other from a fine original bust of Pope, supposed to have been the work of Rysbrac. From these drawings two very beautiful engravings have been made by Mr. Bartolozzi and his pupil Mr. Bovi. After some stay in London, his health, which had never been robust, yielded to extraordinary application, and he was forced to try a seavoyage, and return on a visit to Edinburgh, to settle his father’s affairs, who was then dead, having been some time before in a state of imbecility. On the passage from London to Leith, he was somehow neglected as he lay sick on his hammock, and was on the point of death when he arrived at Leith. With much difficulty he was brought up to Edinburgh, and laid in the bed of his friend Runciman, the artist, who had died not long before in the same place. Here he died, Sept. 5, 1787. His portrait with Runciman, disputing about a passage in Shakspeare’s Tempest, is in the gallery at Dryburgh abbey. This was the joint production of Brown and Runciman before the death of the latter in 1784.

, lord Monboddo, a learned writer of the eighteenth century, was descended from the ancient family of the Burnetts of Leys, in Kincardineshire, and was born at the family seat of Monboddo, in October or November, 1714. He was first educated at the parish school of Laurencekirk, whence he went to King’s college, Aberdeen, and after the usual courses there, studied civil law at Groningen. On his return in 1738, he was admitted to the Scotch bar, where he acquired considerable practice. During the rebellion in 1745, when the administration of justice was interrupted, he went to London, where he became acquainted with some of the literati of the time, particularly Mallet, Thomson, and Armstrong. These visits he often repeated, and enlarged his acquaintance and correspondence with the succeeding generations of learned men, most of whom he survived. During his practice at the Scotch bar, he was particularly distinguished for the part he took in the celebrated Douglas cause, and was eminently instrumental in assisting the family of Douglas, in the prosecution of a suit which was finally determined in their favour. On the death of his relation lord Milton, in 1767, he was promoted to the bench by the title of lord Monboddo, which political intrigue delayed for some time.

During his periods of leisure, the course of his studies led him to attempt the composition of a work, which should afford, to the confusion and astonishment of the moderns, a complete vindication of the wisdom and eloquence of his admired ancients. The volumes of his “Origin and Progress of Language,” were published about the year 1773, and were very variously treated by the critics. Those who were partial to modern literature, on account of their ignorance of that of antiquity, or who, though not unacquainted with the more popular of the ancient authors, were, however, strangers to the deeper mysteries of Greek erudition, condemned lord Monboddo’s work with bitter and contemptuous censure. Nothing, it was said, but the strange absurdity of his opinions, could have hindered his book from falling dead-born from the press. In the late Mr. Harris, however, (the philosopher of Malmesbury), he found an admirer and literary friend, who was himself deeply versant in Grecian learning and philosophy, and was exceedingly delighted to meet with one that had cultivated those studies with equal ardour, and worshipped the excellence of the ancient Greeks, as far above all other excellence. Lord Monboddo’s private life was spent in the practice of all the social virtues, and in the enjoyment of much domestic felicity; the latter, indeed, was for a time interrupted by the death of a wife and son whom he tenderly loved; but he endured the loss with a firmness fitted to do honour either to philosophy or religion.

Amidst this progress of his literary and philosophical studies, lord Monboddo neglected not his duties as a judge. Whether officiating singly, in the character of lord ordinary or reporting judge; assisting his brother judges in full court; or attending to those parts of his judicial duty which were to be discharged by private study, he was still solemnly and indefatigably diligent in these engagements, in preference to all others. As a lawyer, his arguments. opinions, and decisions, were sound, learned, marked with acute discrimination, and free from fantastic peculiarity. He was no favourer of the rich in preference to the poor; nor yet of the poor, at the expence of injustice to the rich. All his whimsies and partialities as a scholar disappeared, when he came to determine concerning the rights of his fellow subjects.

His character is thus given by one of his successors on the bench, lord Woodhouselee. Lord Monboddo " was a man of great worth, honour, and moral rectitude, but of much singularity of opinions and character, which appeared both in the doctrines contained in his writings, in the strain of his conversation, and in the habits of his life. His notions of the origin of language, arts r and sciences, are much akin to those of the Epicureans, of which Lucretius has given an ample detail in his fifth book ‘De rerurn Natura,’ and which Horace has abridged in the third of his satires:

The confirmation of his theory of language, his lordship finds in the condition of savage nations, in those few examples of human creatures discovered in an insulated state, in deserts, and in the rude and defective nature of some languages, and the highly artificial and philosophical structure of others, as the Greek, the Sanscreet, &c. Lord Monboddo carried his admiration of the ancients to such a pitch, as to maintain their superiority over the moderns, not only in philosophical attainments, recondite science, the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, oratory, and all the various species of literary composition; but even in bodily strength, stature, and longevity; esteeming the present race of mortals a degenerate breed, both with respect to mental and corporeal endowments. Yet, with all these eccentricities of opinion, his writings display great erudition, an uncommon acquaintance with Greek philosophy and literature, and a just and excellent spirit of criticism, both on the authors of antiquity, and on the English classical writers of the last and preceding ages. amidst a select party of literary friends, whom he invited to an early supper. The entertainment itself partook of the costume of the ancients; it had all the variety and abundance of a principal meal; and the master of the feast crowned his wine, like Anacreon, with a garland of roses. His conversation, too, had a race and flavour peculiarly its own; it was nervous, sententious, and tinctured with genuine wit. His apothegms were singularly terse and forcible; and the grave manner in which he often conveyed the keenest irony, and the eloquence with which he supported his paradoxical theories, afforded the highest amusement of those truly attic banquets, which will be longremembered by all who had the pleasure of partaking in them."

The first fruit which appeared to the world of so many years spent in the pursuit of knowledge, was a volume published in 1744, containing “Three Treatises. The first concerning Art. The second concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry. The third concerning Happiness.” These treatises, in addition to their merit as original compositions, are illustrated by a variety of learned notes and observations, elucidating many difficult passages of ancient writers, the study and examination of whom it was his earnest wish to promote and to facilitate. Lord Monboddo, speaking >fr the dialogue upon Art, praises it, as containing “the best specimen of the dividing, or diaeretic manner, as the ancients called it, that is to be found in any modern book with which he is acquainted.”