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 his book reads rather like Mr.Galsworthy's _Island Pharisees_ sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention to the evils of his time.

It describes undoubted facts, and it shows that the era of content has gone.