After having enjoyed nearly twelve years of quiet domestic happiness, Bruce lost his wife. She died in 1785, leaving him two children, a son and daughter. Thus deprived of his best friend and companion, he again became restless and melancholy. "The love of solitude," he very justly says, "is the constant follower of affliction. This again naturally turns an instructed mind to study." These feelings Bruce's friends strongly encouraged, and they used every endeavour to rouse him from his melancholy, and to persuade him to occupy his mind in the arrangement and publication of his travels.
"My friends unanimously assailed me," he says, "in the part most accessible when the spirits are weak, which is vanity. They represented to me how ignoble it was, after all my dangers and difficulties, to be conquered by a misfortune incident to all men, the indulgence of which was unreasonable in itself, fruitless in its consequence, and so unlike the expectation I had given my country by the firmness and intrepidity of my former character and behaviour.
"Others, whom I mention only for the sake of comparison, below all notice on any other account, attempted to succeed in the same design by anonymous letters and paragraphs in the newspapers; and thereby absurdly endeavoured to oblige me to publish an account of those travels, which they affected, at the same time, to believe I had never performed."
"It is universally known," states the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, "that doubts have been entertained whether Mr. Bruce was ever in Abyssinia. The Baron de Tott, speaking of the sources of the Nile, says, 'A traveller named Bruce, it is said, has pretended to have discovered them. I saw at Cairo the servant who was his guide and companion during the journey, who assured me that he had no knowledge of any such discovery.'"
To the persuasions of his friends Bruce at last yielded, and, as soon as he resolved to undertake the task, he performed it with his usual energy and application. In about three years he submitted the work, nearly finished, to his very constant and sincere friend, the Hon. Daines Barrington. In the mean while, his enemies triumphantly maintained a clamour against him, and in his study he was assailed by the most virulent accusations of exaggeration and falsehood; and all descriptions of people were against him, from the moralist of the day down to the witty Peter Pindar.
In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, it is stated that Johnson had declared to Sir John Hawkins, "that when he first conversed with Mr. Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, he was very much inclined to believe that he had been there, but that he had afterward altered his opinion!"
Peter Pindar amused all people (except Bruce) by his satirical flings, one of which was,
"Nor have I been where men (what loss, alas!)
Kill half a cow, and turn the rest to grass."
In the year 1790, seventeen years after his return to Europe, Bruce's work was printed and laid before the public. It consisted of five large quarto volumes, and was entitled, "Travels to discover the Sources of the Nile, in the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773, by James Bruce of Kinnaird, Esq., F.R.S."