Even those who have never seen him can form a pretty lively image of him at this time, when his talents have reached all the maturity of which they are capable, and his reputation is at its height.In person, he is about the middle size; his features are regular, and in the expression of his countenance, and especially of his eye, there is a combination of sweetness and calm reflection.His manner and address are somewhat too fastidious, not to say finical and feminine, for a philosopher; but the youths who wait on his lectures are disposed to, over look this, when they fall under the influence of his gentleness, so fitted to win, and of the authority which he has to command.Expectation was on the tiptoe, and he fully met and gratified it.His amiable look, his fine elocution, his acuteness and ingenuity, his skill in reducing a complex subject into a few elements, his show of originality and independence, the seeming comprehensiveness of his system, and, above all, his fertility of illustration, and the glow, like that of stained glass, in which he set forth his refined speculations, did more than delight his youthful audience, -- it entranced them; and, in their ecstasies, they declared that he was superior to all the philosophers who had gone before him, and, in particular, that he had completely superseded Reid, and they gave him great credit, in that he generously refrained from attacking and overwhelming Stewart.He had every quality fitted to make him a favorite with students.His eloquence would have been felt to be too elaborate by a younger audience, and regarded as too artificial and sentimental by an older audience, but exactly suited the tastes of youths between sixteen and twenty.Acourse so eminently popular among students had not, I rather think, been delivered in any previous age in the University of Edinburgh, and has not, in a later age, been surpassed in the fervor excited by Chalmers or Wilson.In the last age you would have met, in Edinburgh and all over Scotland, with ministers and lawyers who fell into raptures when they spoke of his lectures, and assured the younger generation that in comparison with him Wilson {323} was no philosopher, and Hamilton a stiff pedant.It should be added, that, when the students attending him were asked what they had got, not a few could answer only by exclamations of admiration, "How fine!" "How beautiful!" "How ingenious!" In those large classes in the Scottish colleges which are taught exclusively by written lectures, large numbers, including the dull, the idly inclined, and the pleasure-loving, are apt to pass through without receiving much benefit, --unless, indeed, the professor be a very systematic examiner and laborious exacter of written exercises; and this, Irather think, Brown was not.As he left the impression on his students, that there was little wisdom in the past, and that his own system was perfect, he did not create a spirit of philosophic reading such as Hamilton evoked in select minds in a later age.But all felt the -- low of his spirit, had a fine literary taste awakened by his poetical bursts, had their acuteness sharpened by his fine analysis, went away with a high idea of the spirituality of the soul, and retained through life a lively recollection of his sketches of the operations of the human mind.This, I venture to affirm, is a more wholesome result than what was substituted for psychology in the succeeding age, -- <a priori>
discussions derived from Germany or demonstrated idealisms spun out by an exercise of human ingenuity.
His biographer tells us that, on his appointment to the chair, he had retired into the country in order that fresh air and exercise might strengthen him for his labors, and that, when the session opened, he had only the few lectures of the previous winters; but such was the fervor of his genius and the readiness of his pen, that he generally commenced the composition of a lecture after tea and had it ready for delivery next day by noon, and that nearly the whole of the lectures contained in the first three of the four-volumed edition were written the first year of his professorship, and the whole of the remaining next session.
Nor does he appear to have rewritten any portion of them, or to have been disposed to review his judgments, or make up what was defective in his philosophic reading.He seems to have wasted his life in sending forth volume after volume of poetry, which is, doubtless, beautifully and artistically composed, after the model of the English poets of the eighteenth century, but its pictures are without individuality, and {324} they fail to call forth hearty feeling.Far more genuine poetical power comes out incidentally in some of the bursts in his philosophic lectures than in whole volumes of his elaborate versification.