Born at Biggar in Lanarkshire, in 1810, the son of the Secession minister of that town, and of a family already in the third generation of its remarkable distinction in the Scottish religious world as “The Browns of Haddington,” our friend came to Edinburgh in 1822, when he was twelve years old. His father had then removed from Biggar, to assume that pastorate of the Rose Street Secession Church in this city in which, and subsequently in his ministry in the Broughton Place Church, and in his Theological Professorship in connection with the Associate Synod, he attained his celebrity. When I first knew Edinburgh there was no more venerable-looking man in it than this Dr. John Brown of Broughton Place Church. People would turn in the streets to observe his dignified figure as he passed; and strangers who went to hear him preach were struck no less by the beauty of his appearance in the pulpit, the graceful fall of the silver locks round his fine head and sensitive face, than by the Pauline earnestness of his doctrine. At that time, the phrase “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh,” if used in any part of Scotland away from the metropolis, would have been taken as designating this venerable Calvinistic clergyman, and not his son. The son, meanwhile, it is true, was becoming well enough known within Edinburgh on his own account. Having been educated at the High School and the University, and having chosen the medical profession, and been apprenticed for some time to the famous surgeon, Syme, he had taken his degree of M.D. in 1833, and had then,—with no other previous medical experience out of Edinburgh than a short probation among the sailors at Chatham,—settled down permanently in Edinburgh for medical practice. From that date, therefore, on to the time when I can draw upon my own first recollections of him,—say about 1846,—there had been two Dr. John Browns in Edinburgh, the father and the son, the theological doctor and the medical doctor. It was the senior or theological doctor, as I have said, that was then still the “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” _par excellence_, and the name had not transferred itself to the younger with its new signification. He was then about thirty-six years of age, with some little practice as a physician; and my remembrance of him at that time is of a darkish-haired man, of shorter stature than his father, with fine soft eyes, spirited movement, and very benignant manner, the husband of a singularly beautiful young wife, and greatly liked and sought after in the Edinburgh social circles in which he and she appeared. This was partly from the charm of his vivid temperament and conversation, and partly because of a reputation for literary ability that had been recently gathering round him on account of occasional semi-anonymous articles of his in newspapers and periodicals, chiefly art-criticisms. For the hereditary genius of “The Browns of Haddington” had, in this fourth generation of them, turned itself out of the