In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family.  One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no question.  Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are going; there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcass.  And these carcasses, for the most part, answer very well to the characteristic propensity:  they are a squareheaded and snake-necked generation, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in the flank, carrying no lumber.  Then for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing the belief they have in one another.  With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third and fourth generation.  “Blood is thicker than water,” is one of their pet sayings.  They can’t be happy unless they are always meeting one another.  Never were such people for family gatherings; which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together.  For during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are wonderfully antagonistic, and all their opinions are downright beliefs.  Till you’ve been among them some time and understand them, you can’t think but that they are quarrelling.  Not a bit of it.  They love and respect one another ten times the more after a good set family arguing bout, and go back, one to his curacy, another to his chambers, and another to his regiment, freshened for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the height of company.

This family training, too, combined with their turn for combativeness, makes them eminently quixotic.  They can’t let anything alone which they think going wrong.  They must speak their mind about it, annoying all easy-going folk, and spend their time and money in having a tinker at it, however hopeless the job.  It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile.  Most other folk get tired of such work.  The old Browns, with red faces, white whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old age.  They have always a crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are.

And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up, or make them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the right.  Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck’s back feathers.  Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they will be on the lookout for Bill to take his place.

However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular; so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire’s stability; let us at once fix our attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched, and which dwelt in that portion of the royal county of Berks which is called the Vale of White Horse.