Spare Hours — Story, Setting & Ideas

Rab and the Canine World

The centerpiece, 'Rab and His Friends,' is praised in the American note as 'the most perfect prose narrative since Lamb’s “Rosamond Gray.”' Brown's dogs are never sentimentalized. Rab, a mastiff, is described through action and gesture rather than anthropomorphic emotion. The author's knowledge of 'all a cur means when he winks his eye or wags his tail' is not whimsy but a claim to legible animal language. In 'Our Dogs' and 'The Mystery of Black and Tan,' he extends this attention to breed, temperament, and the moral implications of human-animal relations. His motto, as paraphrased in the preface, refuses 'that morality which excludes animals from human sympathy.'

Portrait of a Young Scholar

A substantial excerpt details the education and character of a young man named Arthur—likely Arthur Hallam, though the text never names him directly. The editor describes Arthur's 'strong sense of right and justice,' his fluency in French and Italian, and his rapid acquisition of German. The passage is notable for its clinical detachment: Arthur's 'susceptible temperament' is seen as potentially 'productive of considerable mischief' if left unchecked. The editor prescribes legal study as 'useful discipline' against 'habits of thought' that 'could not but separate him from the every-day business of life.' This tension between intellectual refinement and practical engagement recurs throughout Brown's own essays.

The Art of the Spare Hour

Brown's essays are themselves a defense of the 'spare hour' as a space for reflection. The collection includes art criticism, biographical sketches, and meditations on presence of mind. In 'Presence of Mind and Happy Guessing,' he explores the value of intuitive judgment—a quality he likely valued as a physician. The American editor notes that Brown wrote with 'small leisure for literary composition,' yet his prose is unhurried, even digressive. The epigraph from Izaak Walton—'If thou be a severe sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge'—warns against the very critical rigidity that Brown's leisurely, associative method defies.

Readers approaching Spare Hours should expect a volume that rewards browsing over linear reading. Brown's essays are best taken singly, as their title suggests—each a discrete observation from a working life. The American edition's selection, which excludes medical papers, foregrounds the author's literary and humane interests. Pay attention to the recurring figure of the dog as a test case for sympathy, and to the way Brown's clinical eye never quite leaves even his most affectionate portraits.

There are days when the old doctor’s tenderness — that quiet way he had with Rab, or with a dying man’s hand — feels like something we’ve lost. I find myself lingering on that same unhurried warmth in Peter Plymley's Letters, and Selected Essays — Reading Notes, where wit doesn’t harden the heart. Just a familiar ache, remembered between the lines.