Nevertheless, in attentively reading the latest edition of Bruce's Travels, 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. He hardly starts with his narrative before we have him talking quite familiarly of people and places known only to himself; and, although perfectly at ease and at home, he forgets that his reader is an utter stranger in the land. He seems, likewise, never to have reflected that the generality of mankind were not as fond as himself of seeking 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 this day, they 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, confused his facts and dates, and from his notes being made on separate slips of paper, he fell into several careless mistakes. His dates also are occasionally wrong; but 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, it must be evident to every one, that, when a man visits such immense countries as Bruce travelled over, his great difficulty is to attend to details. No man can attempt to conduct a trigonometrical survey, and to fill it up at the same time: if he has to determine the grand features of the country, it is impossible that he should be very attentive to minute parts; and if he be particular in his details, he can look but little to the general character of the regions he describes. But Bruce was disbelieved _in toto_; and it was even proclaimed that he had never been in Abyssinia at all! Dr. Clarke says: "Soon after the publication of his Travels to discover the sources of the Nile, several copies of the work were sold in Dublin as waste paper, in consequence of the calumnies circulated against the author's veracity." Nothing could be more dignified than his behaviour under such cruel treatment. He treated his country with the silent contempt which it deserved, disdaining to make any reply to publications impeaching his veracity; and when his friends earnestly entreated him to alter, modify, and explain the accounts which he had given, he firmly replied, in the words of his preface, "What I have written I have written!"