to excuse himself in a letter
penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice and its memories.

"I was baptised there; almost all whom I loved and revered were
associated with its history . . . 'The only church in Douglas where
the poor go'--I dare say that is literally true. But I believe it
will continue to be so. . . . I postulate the continuity. . . ."

I quote these words (and so leave them for a while) with a purpose, aware
how trivial they may seem to the reader. But to those who had the
privilege of knowing Brown that cannot be trivial which they feel to be
characteristic and in some degree explicative of the man; and with this
'I postulate the continuity' we touch accurately and simply for once a
note which sang in many chords of the most vocal, not to say orchestral,
nature it has ever been my lot to meet.

Let me record, and have done with, the few necessary incidents of what was
by choice a _vita fallens_ and "curiously devoid of incident." The boy
was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan Vicarage,
near Douglas; the sixth of ten children of a witty and sensible Scots
mother and a father whose nobly humble idiosyncrasies continued in his son
and are worthy to live longer in his description of them:--

"To think of a _Pazon_ respecting men's vices even; not as vices, God
forbid! but as parts of _them_, very likely all but inseparable from
them; at any rate, _theirs!_ Pitying with an eternal pity, but not
exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was
'taking a liberty' if he had confronted the sinner with his sin.
Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment
that the 'weak brethren' thought he was conniving at their weakness.
Not they: they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do
you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy?
God only knows how far down into their depths of misery the sweetness
of that delicacy descends. . . . He loved sincerity, truth and
modesty. It seemed as if he felt that, with these virtues, the
others could not fail to be present."

Add to this that the Vicar of Kirk Braddan, though of no University, was a
scholar in grain; was, for example, so fastidious about composition that
he would make his son read some fragment of an English classic to him
before answering an invitation! "To my father style w