London: For J. Nourse... and C. March... 1768. First Edition
8vo. [x], 160 pp. portrait frontis., cont. calf, gilt spine, slightly rubbed. A fine copy.
The author had a high reputation among his contemporaries as a poet and a wit and his poetry sparkles with humour. Mrs. Piozzi reports Dr. Johnson as saying of Browne that he was ‘of all conversers the most delightful with whom I ever was in company’. And Boswell records, 15 years after Browne’s death, that Johnson, in illustrating the proposition that a man’s powers are not to be judged by his capacity for public speech, claimed that “Isaac Hawkins Browne, one of the first wits of this country, got into parliament and never opened his mouth”.