Mr. Bruce frequently exhibited these drawings during his lifetime, and alluded to the desire he entertained of publishing a work on the antiquities of Africa. Ornamental title-pages for the various parts of this work actually exist, but he appears never to have commenced the letterpress necessary to illustrate the drawings. It is possible that the manner in which his book of travels had been received induced him to abandon the subject in disgust, but it is more probable that the enormous expense of engraving the drawings, estimated at from 3,000l. to 5,000l., rendered the project too costly to be realised.
After his death the increasing taste for the arts and the more general patronage of publications of that nature induced his son to think of making arrangements regarding such a work, but his designs were interrupted by his own death in 1810.
Major Cumming Bruce more than once entered into negotiations with the trustees of the British Museum for the transfer of the whole collection to the nation, but no arrangement satisfactory to both parties could be arrived at, and for the past thirty years they have remained unseen by the present generation, and almost forgotten, in the possession of the Bruce family.
With some of the monuments I was perfectly familiar, and I could judge of their extreme fidelity; others I found to be priceless records of structures which no longer exist; but the remainder, especially those situated in the Regency of Tunis, I could not identify at all, and I immediately formed the determination to follow him in his wanderings as far as it was possible for me to do so, and to ascertain the actual condition of those remarkable ruins, which the depredations of time and of barbarians have not been able to destroy.
To have followed in his footsteps exactly in the same order in which he made the journey would, for many reasons, have been inconvenient; and to have accompanied him throughout the whole extent of his explorations in the districts of the Djerid, Tripoli, and the Cyrenaica was more than I could accomplish. I determined, however, to visit every ruin in Algeria and Tunis which he had illustrated, and so to plan my route as to include all that was most picturesque and instructive in a country hardly at all known to the modern traveller.
No traveller has ever had to contend against a greater amount of ill-deserved obloquy than Bruce. There is hardly an act of his life or a statement in his writings that has not been questioned or received with incredulity; and yet, the more the countries in which he journeyed have been explored, the more his astonishing accuracy and truthfulness have been recognised. I well remember, now nearly thirty years ago, meeting the brothers d’Abbadie at Cairo, on their return from a residence of many years in Abyssinia. I was on terms of intimacy with two of them, and our conversation naturally turned a good deal on Bruce’s travels. They assured me that, though they had occasion to consult his work as a daily text-book, they had never discovered a misstatement, and hardly even an error of any considerable importance in it.
It is not to be supposed that these drawings should have escaped criticism, and some people have even expressed grave doubts as to their having been, in any considerable degree, executed by Bruce himself.
On this point he ought to be allowed to state his own case, and I subjoin all the passages I have found in his MSS. bearing on the subject.
I had all my life applied unweariedly, perhaps with more love than talent, to drawing, the practice of mathematics, and especially that part necessary to astronomy.
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