He was born and raised at Rantavan House near Mullagh, a village in the far south of County Cavan in Ireland,[1][2][3] the son of a clergyman, and he later studied law at Trinity College, Dublin, but embraced literature as a career.
His now forgotten philosophical poem Universal Beauty was published in 1735, and Alexander Pope thought its sentiments and poetry fine.
Further, a facetious "attack" on it was the first public writing of Samuel Johnson, whose A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the English Stage feigns support for Walpole while it drives the censor's argument to reductio ad absurdum.
Although Johnson was objecting to the misuse and overuse of "freedom" and was at that time in a vexatious debate over the United States War of Independence (saying, "Why is it that we hear the loudest cries for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?
John Wesley was so fond of The Fool of Quality, in which Brooke declares his belief in universal salvation,[7] that he sought to have a copy of it given out to all new Methodist churches.