Horatio Brown

Born in Nice, he grew up in Midlothian, Scotland, was educated in England at Clifton College and Oxford, and spent most of his life in Venice, publishing several books about the city.

[2][3][4] Brown's maternal grandfather, Ranaldson MacDonnell, of Invergarry Castle on Loch Oich in Inverness, Chief of Clan MacDonell of Glengarry, had been one of Walter Scott's closest friends.

(died 1834), of New Hall, Carlops,[4] a large country house about twelve miles from the centre of Edinburgh, mostly dating from the 18th century but incorporating parts of a medieval castle.

Enlargements to the house in 1785 were designed by Robert Brown,[6] who later wrote a play called Mary's Bower[7] and a book of Comic Poems in Scots.

At Clifton, Horatio was befriended by a young schoolmaster, John Addington Symonds, who lectured on the Greek poets and became an important influence on his life.

[1][3][10] Brown spoke Italian, French, and German well and was also strong in classical Greek, while a contemporary later described him as "a fair-haired, breezy out-of-doors person with a crisp Highland-Scottish speech".

They went first to Florence, where Gulielmina Brown's Forbes aunts lived, and then settled at Venice, taking an apartment in the Palazzo Balbi Valier on the Grand Canal.

[11] Brown became a leading figure in the English-speaking community, churchwarden of St George's Church in campo San Vio, president of the city's Cosmopolitan Hospital, and honorary treasurer of the Sailors' Institute.

[14] In 1885, the Browns bought a tall, narrow, tenement building on the Zattere looking down the Giudecca Canal and reconstructed it as a house called Cà Torresella.

The University of Edinburgh gave him the honorary degree of doctor of law, the British Academy a gold medal, and the king of Italy honoured him with the rank of cavaliere.

[1] Brown published some homoerotic poems in his collection Drift (1900), but was hostile to the Uranian writers in the circle of Edward Carpenter, and because of his suppression of the truth about Symonds they saw him as a hindrance to homosexual emancipation.

[1] His mother died in 1909, and Brown began to spend the summers in Midlothian, staying at the inn of Penicuik or with his friend Lord Rosebery, a former prime minister.