man, with whom he afterwards quarrelled in the most violent manner. In 1765, he married, and set up a house for the purpose of receiving medical students as boarders. But, his irregular and improvident conduct reduced him to bankruptcy in the short space of two years. A vacancy occurring in the High School, he became a candidate; but being too proud of his real qualifications to think any other recommendation necessary, he was overlooked in favour of some child of patronage. It is said that, when his name, and his name alone, was presented to the eyes of the magistrates, they derisively asked who he was; to which Cullen, then separated in affection from his former pupil, is stated to have answered, with some real or affected hesitation—"Why, sure, this can never be our Jock!" Brown met with a similar repulse, on applying for the chair of theoretical medicine in the university. Yet, notwithstanding every discouragement from the great men of his own profession, this eccentric genius was pressing on towards the completion of that peculiar system by which his name has been distinguished. His views were given to the world, in 1780, under the title "Elementa Medicinæ;" and he illustrated them further by lectures, which were attended, as a supernumerary course, by many of the regular students of the university. The Brunonian system simply consisted in the administration of a course of stimulants, instead of the so-called anti-phlogistic remedies, as a means of producing that change in the system which is necessary to work a cure. The idea was perhaps suggested by his own habits of life, which were unfortunately so very dissolute as to deprive him of all personal respect. He was, perhaps, the only great drinker, who ever exulted in that degrading vice, as justified by philosophical principles. So far from concealing his practices, he used to keep a bottle of whiskey, and another of laudanum, upon the table before him; and, throughout the course of the lecture, he seldom took fewer than three or four doses from each. In truth, Brown lived at a time when men of genius did not conceive it to be appropriate to their character as such, to conduct themselves with decency. Thus, a man who might have adorned the highest walks of society by his many brilliant qualities, was only fit for the company of the lowest and most despicable characters. He was a devout free-mason, but more for the sake of the conviviality to which it affords so fatal an excuse, than for the more recondite and mysterious attractions (if any such exist) of the fraternity. He was the founder of a peculiar lodge in Edinburgh, called the "Roman Eagle," where no language but Latin was allowed to be spoken. One of his friends remarked with astonishment the readiness with which he could translate the technicalities and slang of masonry into this language, which, however he at all times spoke with the same fluency as his vernacular Scotch. It affords a lamentable view of the state of literary society in Edinburgh between the years 1780 and 1790, that this learned lodge was perhaps characterised by a deeper system of debauch than any other. In 1786, Brown removed to London, in order to push his fortune as a lecturer on his own system of medicine, which had already acquired no little fame. But the irregularity of his conduct, and the irascibility of his temperament, rendered all his hopes fruitless. He died at London, October 7, 1788, of a fit of apoplexy, being then little more than fifty years of age. His works have been collected and published by his son; but, like the system which they explain, they are now forgotten.
BROWN, John, an ingenious artist, was the son of Samuel Brown, goldsmith and watch-maker at Edinburgh, where he was born in 1752. He received an excellent education, after the fashion of Scotland, and was early destined to take up the profession of a painter. Having formed a school friendship of no ordinary warmth with Mr David Erskine, son of Thomas Erskine of Cambo, he travelled with that young gentleman in 1774, into Italy, where he was kindly
