Manx worthies: Or, Biographies of notable Manx men and women

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ...in the tenderness which springs out of a large humanity, in genial humour and gaiety, there are few poets of our century, there are no living poets, who have been equally gifted. There is a big burly naturalness, a heartiness, a contempt of trick and artifice, a broad sanity and placidity observable in all his work. These mask the finer, the more delicate and evanescent characteristics, like a hardy serviceable husk;" and, finally, a recent writer in the "Quarterly Review" says:--Mr Brown depicts for us a region that has never been depicted before; he shows us men and women different from any men or women that poet or novelist has hitherto shown--but men and women real, full of life, natural in spite of many peculiarities and oddities, strong in spite of many weaknesses. Such pictures of life are worth preserving; and the poet himself, in his personal feeling, has also phases that have never before been rendered in verse; sudden turns, opening out in a few words unexpected vistas. Individuality stamps the lyrics in these volumes as well as in the narrative poems; and this (provided it be a worthy individuality) is the surest guarantee of permanence. But the man himself--great classical and English scholar, historian, preacher, and musician, as well as poet--with his geniality, his force, his intellectual sincerity, was greater than his work. Let us quote Dr. Percival, now Bishop of Hereford, who first brought him to Clifton:--I have never known anyone at all like him. His whole naturehead and hearH intellect, imagination, emotion--was cast in a larger and more richly varied mould than that of ordinary men; and I have often felt that if his great gifts and powers had only been fused just a little differently he would have been one of the great...