Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/337



 O that our hours were spent, &emsp;Among the sons of men, To praise the Omnipotent, &emsp;Amen, yen, and Amen!

The ludicrous passages are not many in number. The following is one which Pennant first presented to the world; being the soliloquy of Jonah within the whale's belly; taken from "The Flowers of Zion:"—

And it is strange that, immediately after this grotesque description of his situation, Pegasus again ascends, and Jonah begins a prayer to God, conceived in a fine strain of devotion.  , a traveller and scholar of some eminence, was the son of James Brown, M. D. who published a translation of two "Orations of Isocrates," without his name, and who died in 1733. The subject of this article was born at Kelso, May 23d, 1709, and was educated at Westminster School, where he made great proficiency in the Latin and Greek classics. In the year 1722, when less than fourteen years of age, he accompanied his father to Constantinople, where, having naturally an aptitude for the acquisition of languages he made himself a proficient in Turkish, modern Greek, and Italian. On his return in 1725, he added the Spanish to the other languages which he had already mastered. About 1732, he was the means of commencing the publication of the London Directory, a work of vast utility in the mercantile world, and which has since been imitated in almost every considerable town in the empire. After having laid the foundation of this undertaking, he transferred his interest in it to Mr Henry Kent, a printer in Finch-Lane, Cornhill, who carried it on for many years, and eventually, through its means, acquired a fortune and an estate. In 1741, Brown entered into an engagement with twenty-four of the principal merchants in London, to act as their chief agent in carrying on a trade, through Russia, with Persia. Having travelled to that country by the Wolga and the