Джон Браун: Англиялық дін қызметкері, драматург және эссеші

English Anglican priest, playwright and essayist

John Brown (5 November 1715 – 23 September 1766) was an English Anglican priest, playwright and essayist.

He was born in 1715 at Rothbury, Northumberland, the son of the Rev. John Brown (1677–1763), vicar of Wigton from that year, and his wife Eleanor Troutbeck, née Potts. He matriculated at St John's College, Cambridge in 1732, graduating B. A. 1736, and M. A. 1739; he became D. D. in 1755. Graduating as senior wrangler, Brown took holy orders, and was appointed minor canon and lecturer at Carlisle. In the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion he took part in the defence of Carlisle as a volunteer, and in 1747 was appointed chaplain to Richard Osbaldiston, on his appointment to the bishopric of Carlisle. In 1756 Brown was promoted by the Earl of Hardwicke to the living of Great Horkesley in Essex. He made his way as a man of letters as a younger member of the "Warburtonian circle": the followers of the cleric William Warburton.

Brown published Honour (1743), a poem, through Robert Dodsley. 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. This work gained for him the friendship of William Warburton. The Essay was dedicated to Allen, also a supporter of Anglican orthodoxy, and opponent of Shaftesbury. It contains a defence of a utilitarian philosophy, praised later by John Stuart Mill.

Brown was interested in drama, but it earned him the disapproval of Warburton and Richard Hurd.

Brown's major popular success was the Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., 1757–1758), a bitter satire. It struck a chord after the Battle of Minorca (1756), a British reverse at the outset of the Seven Years' War. Thomas Sheridan believed the fundamental issue was selfishness, and the solution better oratory. Robert Wallace replied with The Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain (1758). In it he defended British culture and the current constitution. Brown's An Explanatory Defence of the Estimate (1758) claimed he had acted out to duty to country. Having earned the name "Estimate" Brown, he was prepared to notice Wallace, out of all his critics. 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. 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". Brown had certainly contributed to it, with a number of others including William Mason. Brown's work has been identified as belonging to conjectural history;

The Cure of Saul: a Sacred Ode, a poem on the nature of music, was also from 1763, and was reprinted with the Dissertation. It was twice performed as an oratorio at Covent Garden Theatre that year, and once more in 1767. The associated monograph of oratorio criticism, An Examination of the Oratorios which have been performed this Season, at Covent Garden Theatre (1763) was published within weeks. It contained barely veiled criticism of Smith. Brown was defending his oratorio, and promoting a post Handel reform agenda; The Critical Review had belittled him and his efforts, supporting as it did the Earl of Bute, the Prime Minister, while Brown backed William Pitt. Brown is also associated with the rise of the picturesque, and appreciation of the landscape of the Lake District. He was a family friend of William Gilpin. He wrote on the subject to George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, around 1753. This letter has been identified as the first documentation of the "classicising" of the Lake District. It was published, in part, in 1766, in the London Chronicle; and then as a pamphlet.