DR. JOHN BROWN loved men and dogs so well that the entire English-speaking world loves him for it. His was a tender and manly soul, full of faith in God and man, with such courage to express itself as no weak soul can have, and such genuineness in its expression as no untrue soul can assume. His description of his walk with Thackeray on the Dean road near Edinburgh is full of his peculiar power. “It was a lovely evening,” he writes,—“such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom. Between this cloud and the hills, there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowship color, lucid as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness,—every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross. There it was—unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice to what all were feeling, in the word: ‘Calvary!’ The friends walked on in silence and then turned to other things. All that evening, he was very gentle and serious, speaking as he seldom did of divine things—of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Savior.”

  We might read many biographies of Thackeray without learning as much of the realities of his nature as are here expressed with the most delicate art,—an art which shows us Thackeray’s inmost nature by describing the colors of a sunset sky and the illusion made possible by the commonplace machinery of a stone quarry. This is unquestionably literary art of a high order, and it was made possible for Doctor Brown by that strong and tender sympathy with what is best in nature and human nature which appears everywhere as the master motive of his essays.

  He was born at Biggar, Scotland, in September, 1810. During most of his life he was a practicing physician in Edinburgh, and made on its streets those keen observations of dog nature which in “Rab and His Friends” go far to persuade the reader to believe, with Agassiz, that nobility in dog nature is as immortal as it is in the human soul. Doctor Brown’s essays appear in “Horæ Subsecivæ” (two volumes) and in “John Leech and Other Papers.” He loved what was simple, true, and unpretentious, and his work is never likely to go out of favor.