Browne, Simon, an English Independent minister and contemporary of Dr. Isaac Watts, was born at Shepton Mallet, in Somersetshire, about 1680; and died in 1732. He was the pastor of a Church in Portsmouth and later in London. While living in London he published his original Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1720. He was also the author of a number of prose volumes, among them a Defence of Christianity. Near the close of life he suffered from a peculiar mental disease. He imagined that God in his displeasure had gradually annihilated in him the thinking substance--that he had no reasoning soul. At the same time he was so acute a disputant that his friends said he could reason as if he had two souls. In the old hymn books a number of his hymns were in common use.