Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/338

 Caspian Sea, he established a factory at Reshd, where he continued nearly four years. During this time, he travelled in state to the camp of the famous Kouli Khan with a letter which had been transmitted to him by George II. for that monarch. He also rendered himself such a proficient in the Persic language, as to be able, on his return, to compile a copious dictionary and grammar, with many curious specimens of Persic literature, which, however, was never published. A sense of the dangerous situation of the settlement, and his dissatisfaction with some of his employers, were the causes of his return; and his remonstrances on these subjects were speedily found to be just, by the factory being plundered of property to the amount of L.80,000, and a period being put to the Persian trade. From his return in 1746 to his death, which took place in his house at Stoke Newington, November 30, 1788, he appears to have lived in retirement upon his fortune. In the obituary of the Gentleman's Magazine, he is characterised as a person of strict integrity, unaffected piety, and exalted but unostentatious benevolence.

, author of the "Self-Interpreting Bible," and many popular religious works, was born in the year 1722 at Carpow. a village in the parish of Abernethy and county of Perth, His father, for the greatest part of his life, followed the humble occupation of a weaver, and was entirely destitute of the advantages of regular education, but, nevertheless, seems to have been a man of superior intelligence and worth, and even to have possessed some portion of that zeal in the pursuit of knowledge, and that facility in acquiring it without the ordinary helps, which his son so largely inherited. In consequence of the circumstances of his parents, John Brown was able to spend but a very limited time at school in acquiring the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. "One month," he has himself told us, "without his parent's allowance, he bestowed upon Latin." His thirst for knowledge was intense, and excited him even at this early period to extraordinary diligence in all departments of study, but particularly to religious culture. The strong direction of his mind from the beginning to scholarship in general, and to that kind of it more closely connected with divinity in particular, seems to have early suggested to his mother the possibility of his one day finding scope for the indulgence of his taste in the service of the church, and made her often picture, in the visions of maternal fondness, the day when she should, to use her own homely expression, "see the crows flying over her bairn's kirk."

About the eleventh year of his age he was deprived by death of his father, and soon after of his mother, and was himself reduced, by four successive attacks of fever, to a state which made it probable that he was about speedily to join his parents in the grave. But having recovered from this illness, he had the good fortune to find a friend and protector in John Ogilvie, a shepherd venerable for age, and eminent for piety, who fed his flock among the neighbouring mountains. This worthy individual was an elder of the parish of Abernethy, yet, though a person of intelligence and religion, was so destitute of education as to be unable even to read a circumstance which may appear strange to those accustomed to hear of the universal diffusion of elementary education among the Scottish peasantry, but which is to be accounted for in this case, as in that of the elder Brown, by the disordered state of all the social institutions in Scotland previous to the close of the seventeenth century. To supply his own deficiency, Ogilvie was glad to engage young Brown to assist him in tending his flock, and read to him during the intervals of comparative inaction and repose which his occupation afforded. To screen themselves from the storm and the heat, they built a tittle lodge among the hills, and to this their mountain tabernacle (long after pointed out under this name by the peasants) they frequently repaired to cele-