mea Bey, who had by this time supplanted Ali Bey in the administra tion of the Egyptian government, proved the occasion of introducing Bruce to that ruler with advantages which made the bey willing to gratify him with almost any favour. On this occasion he was not unmindful of the commercial interests of his country. Grateful for the favours he had received from the servants of the British East India company at Jidda, he procured from Mohammed Bey a firman, or letters patent, authorizing the English to transmit their merchandise thither on the payment of more moderate duties than had ever before been exacted from them in any part of the Red sea. This was Bruce's last remarkable transaction with the great men of the East. He soon after sailed from Alexandria, and arrived safe in Europe.

At the British court the African traveller's first reception was sufficiently flattering. His drawings were accepted to enrich the collection of his sovereign, and he was in return presented with the sum of £2000. Proud of his adventures and discoveries, and pleased with the respect and admiration which they attracted, Bruce for a time abandoned himself to exultation, and hoped that a character, tried in an enterprise so perilous and splendid, would not fail to be employed by a discerning king and ministry in some of the most honourable offices his country could bestow. But he was soon to experience the most bitter disappointment. Suspicions were invidiously suggested that his drawings were too exquisitely fine to have been executed, as he pretended, by his own pencil. He was also unfortunate in not knowing to make due concessions in his accounts of what he had seen and achieved to the incredulity of ignorance. In the mean time the public was greatly dissatisfied with his delay to produce a complete narrative of his travels. His friends dreaded lest he should procrastinate a publication which they anxiously longed to obtain, till perhaps his death might for ever frustrate his uncertain intentions of giving it to the world. His enemies maliciously attributed the delay to his consciousness of the imposture and falsehood of his pretensions. The lively De Tott returning into Europe from Turkey and Tartary, pretended to have received from the very servant who had attended Bruce into Abyssinia, an account of the Scottish traveller's adventures in that country, which was directly contradictory of that which Bruce himself had given out. Although Daines Barrington, in a very ingenious paper, refuted the calumny of De Tott, and though all the friends of Bruce were ready to rise up with indignation against this impeachment of his veracity, yet nothing less than the publication of the long-expected narrative by the traveller himself, would now satisfy the suspicions and demands of the public. The task was, after all that he had formerly done, still a difficult one. His astronomical observations were to be revised and verified. It was necessary for him once more to ransack the depths of Grecian and oriental erudition, in order to discover the disagreement or coincidence between what the Jews, Arabs, and Greeks, had recorded, and that which he himself had observed concerning Abyssinia and the other countries of the East. His journals were to be wrought into a regular continuous narrative. His observations on the subjects of natural history were to be carefully compared with the scientific elements of this branch of knowledge, and were, if possible, to be accommodated in his account to the technical phraseology of naturalists. The

beauty of arrangement, the propriety and the graces of style, with all those delicacies of composition which, without long practice, even taste and genius are rarely able to display, were to be attempted by a man, who, though no mean judge of elegance, had long been more attentive to the matter than to the manner of whatever he wrote or read. A considerable period, therefore, was necessarily spent in revising his journals and improving their form. When it was ready for publication, Messrs Robinson of Paternoster-row became the purchasers, not of the copy-right, but of the whole edition. Although the work consisted of five volumes in quarto, yet it experienced a very rapid sale; and in France a translation of it was executed with a degree of haste which almost anticipated the circulation of the original.'

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His last visit to London occurred during the publication of his travels. He returned soon after to Scotland; and the few remaining years of his life were spent either at Edinburgh or at one of his seats in the country. He at length resolved to publish a new edition of his travels in octavo; and, with this view, says one of his anonymous biographers, anxiously consulted the Rev. Dr Blair, at an interview at which I had accidentally the honour to be present, concerning those alterations which the doctor's exquisite taste as a critic, and his judgment as a man of sagacity and discretion, might suggest as fit to be made for the improvement of the work. That revision of his astronomical facts; that correction and polishing anew of the style; that erasure of indelicacies, whether of vanity or obscenity; that amended arrangement; that more complete and satisfactory detail of Abyssinian manners; which Blair, with friendly criticism recommended, Mr Bruce respectfully consented to execute." It was within a very few months after this interview, that just as he had risen from entertaining a company of friends in his house of Kinnaird, and while he was turning round to conduct some of the ladies from his drawing-room to their carriage, he was suddenly attacked with an apoplectic fit, and expired almost immediately.

Subsequent travellers have amply corroborated Bruce's statements on the points most questioned by the impugners of his veracity. "The British world," says a writer in the Westminster Review, "was undoubtedly greatly to blame in their treatment of Bruce, but the fault was not only on their side. It was weak and unworthy to have rejected the story of traveller because some jealous critics, conceited of their feeble lights, led the way in abusing him; but Bruce himself was an ungainly person. Proud, irritable, and unbending, he quickly took the alarm at the first symptoms of incredulity, and haughtily abstained from setting those right who had made but one step in error, and who would have been but too happy to have retracted. Those very qualities which contributed to Bruce's success in his hazardous expedition impeded him at home. Six-feet-four in bodily height, and with a corresponding altitude of spirit, gifted with all kinds of accomplishment, corporeal and intellectual, jealous of his honour, proud of his success, glorying in his ancestors, and not by any means esteeming himself least of his race, he

Bruce himself, favouring the undertaking of the French translator, was pleased to enrich his book by the communication of some facts, which respect for the delicacy of the British fair had withheld him from publishing in English, but concerning which he believed that the literary ladies of France would not be so scrupulous.

was not a person to win his way where he was contemned, and that more particularly in the quarter where he rashly deemed he had laid up immortal honour. Some idea of the temper in which he returned from Abyssinia may be formed from the fact of his travelling to Rome immediately on his arrival in Europe, to chastise an Italian marquess who had presumed, during his twelve years' absence, to marry his Maria, -the lady he had drank to at the source of the Nile, and the woman he had sighed for in the mountains of Abyssinia, his hope and spirit's consolation when sinking under the simoom of the desert of Nubia, and whom he considered as betrothed to himself. The agreeable anecdote of his making a disbeliever of his travels swallow a raw beefsteak, saying, eat that or fight me,' simply proved his antagonist's unwillingness to risk his life, and his own readiness to do so. His admirable reply to Single-Speech Hamilton, his cousin and friend, who said to him one day after dinner, 'Now, Bruce, make us some of those drawings the people think you got Balugani the Italian artist to paint for you.' 'Gerard,' replied Bruce very gravely, you made one fine speech, and the world doubted its being your own composition; but if you will stand up now here and make another speech as good, we shall believe it to have been your own.' Such an answer set down one objector and proved the author's talent at repartee, but left the question of the drawings exactly where it was. On Bruce's return, worn down with fatigue, beset with the diseases of the desert, and bearing about him all the marks of long and arduous travail, the world naturally expected some extraordinary narrative of his proceedings, and the savans and philosophical quid nuncs of the day eagerly crowded round the nouveau debarqué for his intelligence: he told them the most striking facts of his experience, without softening them down or preparing the minds of his auditors, and they laughed incredulously. Such a reception was enough to drive the proud Scot into eternal silence, and for seventeen years he never attempted to publish a written account of his travels. This was a fatal mistake: his retreat seemed like the escape of a fainthearted impostor, another inventor of Formosa islands, and when at length his book did make its appearance, it appeared like the tardy bolstering up of an old story: every wretched scribbler was prepared to refute the elaborate lie. Thus the book was condemned before it appeared. It is painful to mortification, even at this time of day, to hear that the copies of the history of Bruce's arduous travels and singular discoveries, were sold in Dublin for waste paper almost immediately after their appearance. Such a fact coming to the ears of a traveller who had encountered the hardships that Bruce had, and in the spirit of nobleness and patriotism that was always uppermost in his breast, were enough to break the heart of an ordinary man. Bruce was now getting into years, his gigantic form had become proportionately large; he lived in retirement on his estate at Kinnaird, amusing himself with astronomy, the perfecting of his drawings, and the management of his estate; he frequently assumed the turban and the relics of his Eastern attire, and indulged in long fits of apparent contemplation, at which time he was probably reverting to the most stirring period of his life, the six years of Abyssinian adventures, during which every day had its event, when he was dwelling amidst scenes, the commonest of which were too extraordinary to be credited in England, and when he was called upon almost every hour for some effort, on the result 2 H

IV.

of which his existence depended, and, what was far more to him, the honourable termination of his enterprise. These moods naturally astonished his neighbours, who used to exclaim, when they observed him in these moods, Eh! the laird's gane daft.' Such was the course of Bruce's life after his return; and certainly this plan of dealing with the public was not the most politic; but Bruce disdained to manage the world which he was entitled to instruct, and for whose information he had gone through so fiery an ordeal."

This is just as well as generous treatment of Bruce's memory. His most recent biographer, Major Head, has vindicated him with equal success, and still more enthusiasm, while he has, at the same time, very fairly stated the principal defects in Bruce's narrative. "In attentively reading the latest edition of Bruce's travels," says the major, "it must be evident to every one that, in point of composition, the work has very great faults. Bruce had an immense quantity of information to give, but he wanted skill to impart it as it deserved; and certainly nothing can be worse than the arrangement of his materials. In his narrative, he hardly starts before we have him talking quite familiarly of people and of places known only to himself; himself perfectly at ease and at home, he forgets that his reader is an utter stranger in the land. He also forgot, or rather he seems never to have considered, that the generality of mankind were not as fond as himself of endeavouring to trace a dark, speculative question to its source. His theories, which, whether right or wrong, are certainly ingenious, constantly break the thread of his narrative; and, like his minute history of all the kings of Abyssinia supposed to have reigned from the time of Solomon to his day, they tire and wear out the patience of the reader. Yet these were evidently very favourite parts of his volumes: and, eager in detailing evidence and arguments which he conceived to be of great importance, he occasionally neglected his narrative, jumbled his facts and dates, and, from his notes having been made on separate slips of paper, he made a few very careless mistakes. For instance, the beautiful Welleta Selasse, long after she was poisoned, is discovered by the reader making love with Amha Yasous! Tecla Meriam, also, reappears some months after he had been drowned. Arkecho is described after the reader has left it; and the palace of Koscam, in which Bruce lived so long, is not described until he had actually bidden adieu to Abyssinia. But Bruce's attention was evidently engrossed by great objects; and though his descriptions are often brilliant, and his sentiments always noble and manly, yet he cared comparatively little about certain parts of his narrative; and in the enormous mass of notes and memoranda which he brought home with him, he arranged a very few of them in their wrong places. But his mistakes, excepting one, were harmless, and absolutely not worth notice, although to the critic they were, of course, gems of inestimable value. The only one which requires explanation is, that, in describing Gondar, he mentions the death of Balugani (his Italian draughtsman) before he mentions his journey to the source of the Nile; and as Balugani died after this journey, Bruce's enemies in general, and Salt in particular, have endeavoured at great length to prove that this error was deliberately intended to rob Balugani of the honour of having accompanied him to these fountains; whereas, it being perfectly well known that Bruce engaged Balugani at a salary of thirty-five

Roman crowns a-month, for the express purpose of accompanying him in his travels, it is not likely that he should have been jealous of his own servant, particularly as, if he had wished to have gone to Geesh without Balugani, he had only to have ordered him to remain at Gondar. But every trifling mistake which Bruce made was distorted, and construed into fraud and deceit. His dates are occasionally wrong; bu in his notes, which he brought to England, they are often inserted in so trembling a hand, that it is but too evident they were written on a bed of sickness. Besides this, it must surely be known to every one that, when a man visits such immense countries as Bruce travelled across, his great difficulty is to overlook detail; for, like a hound, if once he puts his nose to the ground he gets puzzled. No man attempts to conduct a trigonometrical survey, and to fill it up at the same time; if he is to determine the grand features of the country, it is impossible that he can be very attentive to its detail; and if he is minute in his detail, he can have looked very little to the general character of the country; a man cannot study astronomy and botany at the same time.'

"

John Hunter.

BORN A. D. 1728.-DIED A. D. 1793.

JOHN HUNTER, the brother of William, whose life we have already sketched, was born at Long Calderwood in Lanarkshire, in 1728, being his brother's junior by ten years. Dr Adams, his biographer, represents his early education as having been much neglected. Indeed he appears to have been originally intended for a mechanical employment, and was apprenticed for some time to a carpenter and cabinetmaker who had married his sister. He at last expressed a wish to follow his brother William's profession, and was invited by him to come to London, where, under the able instructions of his brother and Messrs Cheselden and Pott, he soon became an able anatomist and surgeon. In 1752 he was entered at St Mary's hall, Oxford, where he remained only two years. Returning to London in 1754, he was admitted by his brother to partnership as a lecturer and demonstrator of anatomy, in which capacity he gave as much satisfaction as his brother himself. His intense application to professional investigations at last. injured his health; and symptoms of pulmonary affection appearing, he was induced to go abroad as a staff-surgeon. To this appointment military surgery has been greatly indebted; Hunter's observations on gunslict wounds being among the earliest and best contributions to that important branch of surgery.

Sir Everard Home says, that previous to his going abroad, Hunter had made many important contributions to anatomical science; amongst others he had traced the ramification of the olfactory nerves upon the membranes of the nose, and had discovered the course of some of the branches of the fifth pair of nerves. He remained three years abroad. In 1767 he was chosen a fellow of the Royal society. In 1771 he married the sister of Mr, afterwards Sir Everard, Home; and in the same year he published the first part of his treatise on the teeth and