Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Brown, Peter Hume
BROWN, PETER HUME (1849-1918), historian, was born at Tranent, Haddingtonshire, 17 December 1849, and educated in the Free Church school at Prestonpans, which he entered at the age of eight and left only in 1869. His father died in 1852, his mother in 1866, and for the last three years of his school-life he was in the guardianship of unsympathetic relations, acting as a pupil-teacher and presumably sentenced to the career of a schoolmaster. From 1869 to 1872 he was teaching in Wales and at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; but in 1872 he matriculated at Edinburgh University with the idea of becoming a minister. This plan, however, he abandoned in 1874; he left Edinburgh in the hope of obtaining private tutorships which would give him opportunities of continental travel. But his first and only post of this kind took him no farther afield than the south-west of England. Weak health forced him to modify his plans; he returned to Edinburgh and graduated there in 1875. There were two Edinburgh professors to whom, in after years, he acknowledged his obligations, David Masson [q.v.], the biographer of Milton, and Alexander Campbell Fraser [q. v.], the editor of Berkeley; but the most fruitful friendship which he formed in his student days was that with his contemporary, Richard (afterwards Viscount) Haldane, and his true masters were Goethe, Renan, and Sainte-Beuve. On graduating Hume Brown opened a private school in Edinburgh, and in 1879 he married; but, after the untimely death of his wife (1882), he closed his school, went into lodgings in Edinburgh, and devoted himself to historical and literary studies, making a livelihood by private tuition. For the next sixteen years life went hardly with him; but he gradually established his reputation as an historian. In 1890 he published a biography of George Buchanan, the humanist, and in 1892 an edition of Buchanan’s vernacular writings. Three years later appeared his biography of John Knox (1895), which is chiefly remarkable for a resolute avoidance of theological controversy and for the emphasis which it lays upon the political aspects of the reformer’s life-work. Neither work was written for the general public; but, in the opinion of the best judges, they designated Hume Brown as the natural successor to David Masson, when the latter resigned the editorship of the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland in 1898. In 1899 Hume Brown published the first volume of his History of Scotland; in 1901 he was appointed to Sir William Fraser’s chair of ancient history in the university of Edinburgh. These appointments relieved him of financial anxieties at an age when large undertakings are rarely planned with any confidence that they will be completed. Hume Brown, however, organized his life with method and with forethought. In the course of the next seventeen years he completed his History, continued the publication of the Register, and wrote two admirable courses of lectures on Scotland in the Time of Queen Mary (1904) and The Legislative Union of England and Scotland (1914). He also undertook and finished the Life of Goethe which he himself regarded as his magnum opus. Preliminary studies, on the Youth of Goethe, appeared in 1913; the Life, completed just before his death, was posthumously published in 1920. He died, of cerebral haemorrhage, on 30 November 1918, in his Edinburgh home at the foot of the Braid Hills.
By profession an historical expert, by inclination a student of the human microcosm, and at heart profoundly sceptical of ideas which express themselves in the political framework of society, Hume Brown possessed something of the ironic quality which amused him in Erasmus, much of the aphoristic wisdom which he reverenced in Goethe; but his salient characteristics were the insatiable curiosity and almost unbounded tolerance which made Sainte-Beuve, in his opinion, the king of literary critics. As a writer he was too cautious, or unduly respectful to his public; he contented himself, in print, with expressing his mature conviction in precise and polished sentences. In conversation it was otherwise; he talked of subjects on which his mind was not yet made up, hazarded conjectures, lapsed into paradox or quiet and genial malice, argued the moot points, would even generalize with a half-humorous reluctance. His influence on younger men was remarkable; in matters intellectual he was a sort of father-confessor to whom they turned instinctively for guidance.
[Notices by G. Macdonald in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. viii, and by C. H. Firth in Scottish Historical Review, January 1919; personal knowledge.]