John Brown (essayist)

[1] Brown was consulted, through Daniel Dumaresq, about a scheme of education which Catherine II of Russia wanted to introduce into her dominions.

[3] There is a detailed account of John Brown by Andrew Kippis in Biographia (1780), containing the text of the negotiations for his journey to Russia.

[3] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and The Machiavellian Moment agree that Brown was a writer influenced by Machiavelli, Bolingbroke, and Montesquieu.

[4][5] He made his way as a man of letters as a younger member of the "Warburtonian circle": the followers of the cleric William Warburton.

It was followed by An Essay on Satire Occasion'd by the Death of Mr Pope (1745), which Brown at Carlisle published through Dodsley in London.

[1] The "test of ridicule" was supposed to be a key part of Shaftesbury's doctrine; Warburton wanted it undermined, and gave Brown the task.

[1] Brown's theoretical argument, that ridicule was a type of valuation incompatible with a role as truth value, was taken up by William Preston.

[1] Edmund Burke, in a review for The Annual Register for 1758, rejected Brown's analysis as far as it depended on charges of "effeminacy" in the British nation and aesthetic.

"[15] A sequel on the politics of the Seven Years' War was Additional Dialogue of the Dead between Pericles and Cosmo (1760), in vindication of William Pitt the elder's policy.

[3] Brown knew Charles Avison, the Newcastle organist and composer, who published in 1752 An Essay on Musical Expression.

[16][17] The following year William Hayes defended Handel against Avison in a pamphlet, and stated that his Essay had been written for him by a "Junto".

[1] Avison's work prompted other such British aesthetic syntheses, from James Beattie, Thomas Twining and Daniel Webb; and the theme was picked up by German writers.

[20] Brown's work has been identified as belonging to conjectural history;[1] he described in a 1761 letter to Garrick his stadial method of "deducing things from their state in savage life, through the several stages of civilized society.