We are not, however, inclined to think that this trial was due to the cause which Livingstone assigned,--his want of experience, and want of command over the English tongue. He was by no means an inexperienced writer. He had written large volumes of Journals, memoirs for the Geographical Society, articles on African Missions, letters for the Missionary Society, and private letters without end, each usually as long as a pamphlet. He was master of a clear, simple, idiomatic style, well fitted to record the incidents of a journey--sometimes poetical in its vivid pictures, often brightening into humor, and sometimes deepening into pathos. Viewing it page by page, the style of the _Missionary Travels_ is admirable, the chief defect being want of perspective; the book is more a collection of pieces than an organized whole: a fault inevitable, perhaps, in some measure, from its nature, but aggravated, as we believe, by the haste and pressure under which it had to be written. In his earlier private letters, Livingstone, in his single-hearted desire to rouse the world on the subject of Africa, used to regret that he could not write in such a way as to command general attention: had he been master of the flowing periods of the _Edinburgh Review,_ he thought he could have done much more good. In point of fact, if he had had the pen of Samuel Johnson, or the tongue of Edmund Burke, he would not have made the impression he did. His simple style and plain speech were eminently in harmony with his truthful, unexaggerating nature, and showed that he neither wrote nor spoke for effect, but simply to utter truth. What made his work of composition irksome was, on the one hand, the fear that he was not doing it well, and on the other, the necessity of doing it quickly. He had always a dread that his English was not up to the critical mark, and yet he was obliged to hurry on, and leave the English as it dropped from his pen. He had no time to plan, to shape, to organize; the architectural talent could not be brought into play. Add to this that he had been so accustomed to open-air life and physical exercise, that the close air and sedentary attitude of the study must have been exceedingly irksome; so that it is hardly less wonderful that his health stood the confinement of book-making in England, than that it survived the tear and wear, labor and sorrow, of all his journeys in Africa. An extract from a letter to Mr. Maclear, on the eve of his beginning his book (21st January, 1857), will show how his thoughts were running: