longer respected, or who never, except from their numbers, possessed any. No man of competent understanding and knowledge of mankind can read Bruce's Travels without a thorough conviction that the writer was a person of the strictest honour and veracity, who, though as in the case of Paez, he might be hurried by wounded pride and indignation into the commission of injustice, was wholly incapable of deliberate falsehood. That the name of Dr. Johnson is found among those of Bruce's enemies, is to be regretted on Dr. Johnson's own account. But the circumstance can excite no surprise in any one who recollects that the doctor likewise distinguished himself among the calumniators of Milton—a name which has long since ranked among the first which history records, and is the representative, as it were, of every thing that is most sacred in genius, and most unsullied in virtue. The other cavillers at Bruce demand no ceremony. Their absurd rancour has been stimulated by a secret conviction of their own inferiority in talent and enterprise; and, despairing of raising themselves to his level, they have endeavoured to bring him down to their own. Swift explains in two lines the whole philosophy of this proceeding:—
I have no title to aspire:
Yet, if you sink, I seem the higher!
It will be remembered that Marco Polo met with very nearly the same fate with Bruce, being not only disbelieved during his lifetime, but having to endure, even on his death-bed, the monstrous incredulity of his nearest relations, who, pressing around him, conjured him for the love of Christ, and the salvation of his soul, to retract the fictions which they imagined he had advanced in his writings. With the noble intrepidity which Bruce, I doubt not, would have shown under similar circumstances, he refused to abate a jot of his assertions, which, he
