Bruce wrote an autobiography, part of which is printed in editions of his Travels, published in 1805 and 1813, accompanied by a biographical notice by the editor, Alexander Murray. The best edition of the Travels is the third (Edinburgh, 1813, 8 vols.). Of the abridgments the best is that of Major (afterwards Sir Francis) Head, the author of a well-informed Life of Bruce (London, 1830). The best account of Bruce's travels in Barbary is contained in Sir R. Lambert Playfair's Travels in the Footsteps of Bruce (London, 1877), in which a selection of his drawings was published for the first time. Several of Bruce's drawings were presented to George III. and are in the royal collection at Windsor.
[1] Dr Shaw's Travels relating to Several Parts of Barbary ... was first printed at Oxford (1738).
BRUCE, MICHAEL (1746-1767), Scottish poet, was born at Kinnesswood in the parish of Portmoak, Kinross-shire, on the 27th of March 1746. His father, Alexander Bruce, was a weaver, and a man of exceptional ability. Michael was taught to read before he was four years old, and one of his favourite books was a copy of Sir David Lyndsay's works. He was early sent to school, but his attendance was often interrupted. He had frequently to herd cattle on the Lomond Hills in summer, and this early companionship with nature greatly influenced his poetic genius. He was a delicate child, and grew up contemplative, devotional and humorous, the pet of his family and his friends. His parents gave him an education superior to their position; he studied Latin and Greek, and at fifteen, when his school education was completed, a small legacy left to his mother, with some additions from kindly neighbours, provided means to send Michael to Edinburgh University, which he attended during the four winter sessions 1762-1765. In 1765 he taught during the summer months at Gairney Bridge, receiving about £11 a year in fees and free board in one or other of the homes of his pupils. He became a divinity student at Kinross of a Scottish sect known as the Burghers, and in the first summer (1766) of his divinity course accepted the charge of a new school at Forest Hill, near Clackmannan, where he led a melancholy life. Poverty, disease and want of companions depressed his spirits, but there he wrote "Lochleven," a poem inspired by the memories of his childhood. He had before been threatened with consumption, and now became seriously ill. During the winter he returned on foot to his father's house, where he wrote his last and finest poem, "Elegy written in Spring," and died on the 5th of July 1767.
As a poet his reputation has been spread, first, through sympathy for his early death; and secondly, through the alleged theft by John Logan (q.v.) of several of his poems. Logan, who had been a fellow-student of Bruce, obtained Bruce's MSS. from his father, shortly after the poet's death. For the letters, poems, &c., that he allowed to pass out of his hands, Alexander Bruce took no receipt, nor did he keep any list of the titles. Logan edited in 1770 Poems on Several Occasions, by Michael Bruce, in which the "Ode to the Cuckoo" appeared. In the preface he stated that "to make up a miscellany, some poems written by different authors are inserted." In a collection of his own poems in 1781, Logan printed the "Ode to the Cuckoo" as his own; of this the friends of Bruce were aware, but did not challenge its appropriation publicly. In a MS. Pious Memorials of Portmoak, drawn up by Bruce's friend, David Pearson, Bruce's authorship of the "Ode to the Cuckoo" is emphatically asserted. This book was in the possession of the Birrell family, and John Birrell, another friend of the poet, adds a testimony to the same effect. Pearson and Birrell also wrote to Dr Robert Anderson while he was publishing his British Poets, pointing out Bruce's claims. Their
communications were used by Anderson in the "Life" prefixed to Logan's works in the British Poets (vol. ii. p. 1029). The volume of 1770 had struck Bruce's friends as being incomplete, and his father missed his son's "Gospel Sonnets," which are supposed by the partisans of Bruce against Logan to have been the hymns printed in the 1781 edition of Logan's poems. Logan tried to prevent by law the reprinting of Bruce's poems (see James Mackenzie's Life of Michael Bruce, 1905, chap. xii.), but the book was printed in 1782, 1784, 1796 and 1807. Dr William McKelvie revived Bruce's claims in Lochleven and Other Poems, by Michael Bruce, with a Life of the Author from Original Sources (1837). Logan's authorship rests on the publication of the poems under his own name, and his reputation as author during his lifetime. His failure to produce the "poem book" of Bruce entrusted to him, and the fact that no copy of the "Ode to the Cuckoo" in his handwriting was known to exist during Bruce's lifetime, make it difficult to relieve him of the charge of plagiarism. Prof. John Veitch, in The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry (1887, vol. ii. pp. 89-91), points out that the stanza known to be Logan's addition to this ode is out of keeping with the rest of the poem, and is in the manner of Logan's established compositions, in which there is nothing to suggest the direct simplicity of the little poem on the cuckoo.
Bibliography.—Additions to Poems on Several Occasions (1770) were made by Dr McKelvie in his 1837 edition. He gives (p. 97) a list of the poems not printed in Logan's selection, and of those that are lost. See the "Lives" of Bruce and of Logan in Anderson's British Poets (1795); an admirable paper on Bruce in The Mirror (No. 36, 1779), said to be by William Craig, one of the lords of session; The Poetical Works of Michael Bruce, with Life and Writings (1895), by William Stephen, who, like Dr A.B. Grosart in his edition (1865) of The Works of Michael Bruce, adopts McKelvie's view. A restatement of the case for Bruce's authorship, coupled with a rather violent attack on Logan, is to be found in the Life of Michael Bruce, Poet of Loch Leven, with Vindication of his Authorship of the "Ode to the Cuckoo" and other Poems, also Copies of Letters written by John Logan now first published (1905), by James Mackenzie.
BRUCH, MAX (1838- ), German musical composer, son of a city official and grandson of the famous Evangelical cleric, Dr Christian Bruch, was born at Cologne on the 6th of January 1838. From his mother (née Almenräder), a well-known musician of her time, he learnt the elements of music, but under Breidenstein he made his first serious effort at composition at the age of fourteen, by the production of a symphony. In 1853 Bruch gained the Mozart Stipendium of 400 gulden per annum for four years at Frankfort-on-Main, and for the following few years studied under Hiller, Reinecke and Breunung. Subsequently he lived from 1858 to 1861 as pianoforte teacher at Cologne, in which city his first opera (in one act), Scherz, List und Roche, was produced in 1858. On his father's death in 1861, Bruch began a tour of study at Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Munich, Dresden and Mannheim, where his opera Lorelei was brought out in 1863. At Mannheim he lived till 1864, and there he wrote some of his best-known works, including the beautiful Frithjof. After a further period of travel he became musical-director at Coblenz (1865-1867), Hofkapellmeister at Sondershausen (1867-1870), and lived in Berlin (1871-1873), where he wrote his Odysseus, his first violin concerto and two symphonies being composed at Sondershausen. After five years at Bonn (1873-1878), during which he made two visits to England, Bruch, in 1878, became conductor of the Stern Choral Union; and in 1880 of the Liverpool Philharmonic. In 1892 he was appointed director of the Berlin Hochschule. In 1893 he was given the honorary degree of Mus. Doc. by Cambridge University. Max Bruch has written in almost every conceivable musical form, invariably with straight-forward honest simplicity of design. He has a gift of refined melody beyond the common, his melodies being broad and suave and often exceptionally beautiful.
BRUCHSAL, a town of Germany, in the grand-duchy of Baden, prettily situated on the Saalbach, 14 m. N. from Karlsruhe, and an important junction on the main railway from Mannheim to Constance. Pop. (1900), including a small garrison, 13,555. There are an Evangelical and four Roman Catholic churches, among the latter that of St Peter, the burial-place of the bishops of Spires, whose princely residence (now used as a prison) lies in the vicinity. Bruchsal has a fine palace, with beautiful grounds attached, a town hall, a classical, a modern and a commercial school, and manufactures of machinery, paper, tobacco, soap and beer, and does a considerable trade in wine. Bruchsal (mentioned in 937 as Bruxolegum) was originally a royal villa (Königshof) belonging to the emperors and German kings. Given in 1002 to Otto, duke of Franconia, it was inherited by the cadet line of Spires, the head of which, the emperor Henry III., gave it to the see of Spires in 1095. From 1105 onward it became the summer residence of the bishops, who in 1190 bought the Vogtei (advocateship) from the counts of Calw, and the place rapidly developed into a town. It remained in the possession of the bishops till 1802, when by the treaty of Lunéville it was ceded, with other lands of the bishopric on the right bank of the Rhine, to Baden. The Peasants' War during the Reformation period first broke out in Bruchsal. In 1609 it was captured by the elector palatine, and in 1676 and 1698 it was burnt down by the French. In 1849 it was the scene of an engagement between the Prussians and the Baden revolutionists.
See Rössler,Geschichte der Stadt Bruchsal (2nd ed., Bruchsal, 1894).
BRUCINE, C23H26N2O4, an alkaloid isolated in 1819 by J. Pelletier and J.B. Caventou from "false Angustura bark." It crystallizes in prisms with four molecules of water; when anhydrous it melts at 178°. It is very similar to strychnine (q.v.), both chemically and physiologically.