MNE SOLUM FORTI PÁTRIA* Such is the motto selected
by James Bruce for the title-page of the last volume of his "Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile." Few men have ever so fully as himself demonstrated its truth. During the ten years he spent 'in Africa, among savage men and scenes of danger and desolation, his life was as useful and cheerful, as really that of a true Briton and a gentleman, as if it had been tranquilly passed at his own country seat of Kinnaird, in the society of his friends, and in the prosecution of his favourite studies or amusements. Whether as British Consul at the barbarous court of Algiers, or as a private traveller, "unprotected, forlorn, and alone, or at times associated with beggars and banditti," he ever conducted himself as a brave man should. He passed, to use his own words, "through melancholy and dreary deserts, ventilated with poisonous winds, and glowing with eternal sunbeams," and "described a circumference whose greater axis comprehended twenty-two degrees of the equator, in which dreadful circle was contained all that is terrible to the
*Every soil is a fatherland to the brave man.
