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.