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.