In the heroic ages of Bruce and Mungo Park, Denham and Clapperton, Hornemann and Caillié, African travel had a prestige which, after living through a generation, came, as is the fate of all things sublunary, to a natural end. The public glutted with adventure and invention, which the ‘damnable license of printing’ ushered into the world, soon suffered from the humours of a severe surfeit: it learned to nauseate the monotonous tale of rapine, treachery, and murder; of ugly and unsavoury savagery—the mala gens, as was said anent certain South countrymen, of a bona terra—of bleared misery by day and animated impurity by night, and of hunting adventures and hair-breadth escapes, which often made the reader regret the inevitable absence of a catastrophe. It felt the dearth of tradition and monuments of the olden time, the lack of romance, variety, and history, whilst the presence of a ‘future,’ almost too remote for human interest, was rather an aggravation than a palliation of the evil. A temporary revival of interest was, it is true, recited by the Egyptian hippopotamus and Gordon Cumming’s trophies: Livingstone’s first journey and Paul du Chaillu’s gorilla also caused a transient burst of enthusiasm. But this soon had its day, and the night that followed was darker than before. In fact it still glooms. Yet African travel still continues to fulfil all the conditions of attractiveness as laid down by that great city authority, Leigh Hunt. The theme has remoteness and obscurity of place, difference of custom, marvellousness of hearsay; events passing strange yet credible; sometimes barbaric splendour, generally luxuriance of nature, savage life, personal danger and suffering always borne (in books) with patience, dignity, and even enthusiasm. Moreover, no hours are more fraught with smiling recollections to the author: nothing can he more charming than the contrast between his vantage ground of present ease, as he takes up his pen at home, and that past perspection of want, hardships, and accidents upon which he gazes through the softening, beautifying atmosphere of time. And the animus of the writer must to some extent inspire his readers.