An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times

by John Brown

This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

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About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Brown (1715-1766) was an English Anglican priest, playwright and essayist.

Reviews

[Andie]

I read this to get into the minds of eighteenth-century Englishmen and women. Considering what I've read until now, this book exemplifies the widespread concern with the "degeneracy of Britishness" in the eighteenth century. Contemporaries were worried about the dangers of Luxury, Trade, Commerce and Wealth. They looked around and either they missed an earlier society, or they were convinced by moralist authors that they should fear the progress Britain had achieved until now. What John Brown does here, then, is to list the problem and the reason why that is the state of society in the century.
He concludes that trade is good in the first stages, but destructive and deadly in the last, because it prompts passions such as luxury and vanity, thus creating an "effeminate" society that weakened the public spirits and all the other principles and manners that may counterweight the dangers of trade.