Page:A voyage to Abyssinia (Salt).djvu/273

 wilful deviations from the truth? The answer is plain: that he was impelled to it by an anxious and vehement desire of obtaining the sole credit of having first visited the sources of the Nile, and an aversion from his being known to have had any partner in his researches on this occasion; motives which however unworthy of an enlightened mind, are known to have operated so strongly on our author's feelings, that he has made them the ruling features in his work, as the very title, "Journey to discover the sources of the Nile," his romantic exultation on that particular point in his preface, and his continual misrepresentations respecting Lobo and Peter Paiz, for having preceded him in this hazardous enterprise, sufficiently prove.

Before I quit this subject, I shall notice one additional instance of decided contradiction that occurs between the printed narrative and the original notes published by his late editors, which may serve to give the reader a pretty correct notion of the manner in which this author wrought up and embellished his original observations: in accomplishing which he has evinced a power of interesting the feelings that is almost unexampled. The circumstance to which I refer is Mr. Bruce's account of the discovery of King Joas's body and the events to which it gave rise. In the printed narrative Mr. Bruce relates, that "about the 10th of August, Zor Woldo, a Galla, was taken up, who confessed himself to have been concerned in the murder of the Emperor Joas, and that he pointed out the place in the church-yard of St. Raphael, where he had been buried with his clothes on: that Zor Woldo was carried to execution; that the body of Joas was raised, and exposed in a very indecent manner in the church; that on the following day he went to the church, and gave the monk a Persian carpet to lay it on, and a web of coarse muslin to cover it; and that it continued lying in the church till October, when, owing to a threat from Ras Michael, it was privately interred." After this Mr. Bruce relates in an affecting way the credit he gained throughout the country for the humane he had acted, and that Ozoro Esther one day placed him