professe.’ This elicited from Welsche 'A Reply against Mr Gilbert Browne, priest' Edinburgh, 1602, 4to, afterwards reprinted under the title of 'Popery anatomized.' At the time Welsche published this reply Dumfries 'had become the seat of excommunicated papists and jesuits;' and the abbot is described as the 'famous excommunicat, foirfaultit, and perverting papist named Mr. Gilbert Browne, Abbot of New Abbey, quho evir since the reformatioun of religioune had conteinit in ignorance and idolatrie allmost the haill south west partis of Scotland and had been continowallie occupyit in practiseing of heresy.' At length Abbot Brown was captured near New Abbey in August 1605. The country people rose in arms to rescue him but were overpowered by Lord Cranstoun and his guardsmen. Brown was first conveyed to Blackness castle, and thence transferred to the castle of Edinburgh, 'where he was interteaned upon the kings expenses till his departure out of the countrie,' (Calderwood, Historie of the Kirk of Scotland, vi. 295). Eventually he was banished and he died at Paris on 14 May 1612.
[Cat. of Printed Books in Brit. Mus.; Calderwood's Hist. of the Kirk of Scotland (Wodrow Soc.), v. 39, 416, vi. 295, 367, 576, 764; Gordon's Catholic Church in Scotland, 526; Keith's Cat. of Scottish Bishops (1824), 425; McCrie's Life of Melville ii. 208; Murray's Lit. Hist. of Galloway, 56–8, 121–3.]
BROWN, IGNATIUS (1630–1679), Irish writer, was born in the county of Waterford in 1630, but educated in Spain. In his twenty-first year he was admitted into the society of jesuits at Compostella. After teaching belles-lettres for some time in Castile, he was sent on a mission into his own country, whence removing into France he became rector, in 1676, of the newly founded Irish seminary at Poitiers. Having been appointed confessor to the Queen of Spain, he died at Valladolid in 1679, during a journey to Madrid. He was the author of 'The Unerring and Unerrable Church, in Answer to a Sermon of Andrew Sall, preached at Christ Church Dublin in July 1674 (dedicated in ironical terms to the Earl of Essex), 1675, and 'An Unerrable Church or None Being a Rejoinder to "The Unerring and Unerrable Church," against Dr Andrew Sall's Reply, entitled "The Catholic and Apostolic Church of England"' (dedicated to the Duke of Ormonde), 1678. He is also the reputed author of a treatise, 'Pax Vobis.'
[Ware's Works Harris, ii. 186-7.]
BROWN, JAMES (1709–1788), traveller and scholar, was son of James Brown, M.D., of Kelso in Roxburghshire, where he was born on 23 May 1709. He received his education at Westminster School, 'where he was well instructed in the Latin and Greek classics,' notwithstanding that he must have left school at the early age of thirteen as in the year 1722 he went with his father to Constantinople. During the three years of his stay in the East on this occasion the boy, 'having a great natural aptitude for the learning of languages acquired a competent knowledge of Turkish, vulgar Greek, and Italian.' In 1725 he returned home, and 'made himself master of the Spanish language.' About the year 1732 he conceived for the first time (it has been said) the idea of a 'Directory of the Principal Traders in London.' A 'Directory' upon a similar plan had however been already published in London as early as 1677. After having been at some pains to lay the foundation of it, he gave it to Henry Kent, printer, in Finch Lane, Cornhill, who made a fortune by the publication. In 1741 he attempted to carry out a more ambitious project namely to establish a trade with Persia via Russia. Having entered into an agreement for the purpose with twenty-four of the principal merchants of London members of the Russia Company, he sailed for Riga on Michaelmas day 1741, 'passed through Russia down the Volga to Astrachan, and sailed along the Caspian Sea to Reshd in Persia, where he established a factory in which he continued, near four years. While there he was the bearer of a letter from George II to Nadir Shah. Dissatisfied with his employers and impressed with the dangers to which the factory was exposed from the unsettled nature of the Persian government, he resigned his post and reached London on Christmas day 1746.
The following year the factory at Reshd was plundered, and a final period put to the Persia trade. His old aptitude for languages enabled him during his four years' stay at Reshd to acquire such proficiency in Persian that on his return he compiled 'a copious Persian Dictionary and Grammar,' which however was never published. Lysons states that Brown was also the author of a translation of two orations of Isocrates, published anonymously. He died of a paralytic stroke on 30 Nov. 1788, at his house in Stoke Newington where he had resided since 1734, and was buried in the parish church of St Mary, where there is a tomb erected to his memory (Lysons iii. 290).
[Gent. Mag. lviii pt. ii p. 1128; Lysons's Environs of London, iii. 301-2.]
