With such advantages in the worthy doctor's favor, he might have kept the field until some newer extravaganza had made his own obsolete, had not one ugly turn in political affairs given so smashing a refutation to his practical conclusions, and called forth so sudden a rebound of public feeling in the very opposite direction, that a bomb- shell descending right through the whole impression of his book could not more summarily have laid a chancery "injunction" upon its further sale. This arose under the brilliant administration of the first Mr. Pitt: England was suddenly victorious in three quarters of the globe; land and sea echoed to the voice of her triumphs; and the poor Doctor Brown, in the midst of all this hubbub, cut his own throat with his own razor. Whether this dismal catastrophe were exactly due to his mortification as a baffled visionary, whose favorite conceit had suddenly exploded like a rocket into smoke and stench, is more than we know. But, at all events, the sole memorial of his hypothesis which now reminds the English reader that it ever existed is one solitary notice of good-humored satire pointed at it by Cowper. [Footnote: "The Inestimable Estimate of Brown."] And the possibility of such exceeding folly in a man otherwise of good sense and judgment, not depraved by any brain-fever or enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the vicious process of reasoning applied to such estimates; the doctor, having taken up one novel idea of the national character, proceeded afterwards by no tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts and phenomena of daily experience, but resolutely developed out of his one idea all that it appeared analytically to involve; and postulated audaciously as a solemn fact whatsoever could be exhibited in any possible connection with his one central principle, whether in the way of consequence or of affinity.