His book is too evidently modelled upon Montesquieu, whom he mentions with reverence, to make us doubt its derivation.  There is the same reliance upon Livy and Machiavelli, the same attempt at striking generalization; though the argument upon which Brown’s conclusions are based is seldom given, perhaps because his geometric clarity of statement impressed him as self-demonstrative.  Brown’s volumes are an essay upon the depravity of the times.  He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy.  He condemns the universities out of hand, in phrases which Gibbon and Adam Smith would not have rejected.  He deplores the decay of taste and learning.  Men trifle with Hume’s gay impieties, and could not, if they would, appreciate the great works of Bishop Warburton.  Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests.  The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues.  The neurotic temper of the times is known to all.  The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly.  Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves to fashion; the navy’s main desire is for prize money.  Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman.  The poor, indeed, the middle class, and the legal and medical professions, Brown specifically exempts from this indictment.  But he emphasizes his belief that this is unimportant.  “The manners and principles of those who lead,” he says, “... not of those who are governed ... will ever determine the strength or weakness, and therefore the continuance or dissolution of a state.”

This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured.  So far as he has an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the decay of religious sentiment.  His remedy is only Bolingbroke’s Patriot King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height of power.  What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a natural death.  What is more interesting than his prophecies was the evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu.  English liberty, he says, is the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and sullen temper.  Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.  Brown has no passion, and