ABSTRACT
North American Review presents a review of The Life of Charles Brockden Brown. The usual complaint is that the life of a man of letters is almost necessarily wanting in incident, and when the writer has made this general apology for a meagre narrative, he too often feels at liberty to be as deficient in everything as may suit his ignorance indolence, or want of discrimination. He is unable perhaps to collect such facts in the life of a scholar as are commonly called remarkable, and hence infers that there is nothing in it worthy of public notice. His life was pure, but he says that frail health had made him an exile from temptation, that his virtue was under the protection of nature; he is grateful for his infirmities, and thinks he loved intellectual glory because he had no resource but in intellectual pleasure. Brown owes his reputation to his novels.
