I have no title to aspire: Yet, if you sink, _I seem the higher!_
It will be remembered that Marco Polo met with very nearly the same fate with Bruce, being not only disbelieved during his lifetime, but having to endure, even on his death-bed, the monstrous incredulity of his nearest relations, who, pressing around him, conjured him for the love of Christ, and the salvation of his soul, to retract the fictions which they imagined he had advanced in his writings. With the noble intrepidity which Bruce, I doubt not, would have shown under similar circumstances, he refused to abate a jot of his assertions, which, he solemnly averred, fell far short of the truth. The persecution of Marco Polo, however, arose wholly from the ignorance of his contemporaries; but Bruce had a foible, abundantly visible in his writings, from which the great Italian traveller was altogether exempt—I mean an arrogant and intolerable vanity. Even the most charitable of readers must frequently, in perusing Bruce’s writings, be angered, if not disgusted, at its perpetual recurrence in the coarsest and most undisguised forms; but when we reflect, that notwithstanding this foible, or partly, perhaps, in consequence of it, he was one of the most enterprising, adventurous, and indefatigable of travellers, we readily consent to overlook this defect in consideration of the many excellences which accompany it. As a writer he is slovenly and immethodical, and destitute to a remarkable degree of the graces of style; but, on the other hand, he is always so much in earnest, and so natural, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, that it would argue nothing short of actual stupidity to doubt of the truth of what he relates.
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JONAS HANWAY, equally celebrated as a traveller and a philanthropist, was born on the 12th of August, 1712, at Portsmouth, in Hampshire. His father dying while he was yet a child, he was removed with the other members of the family to London, where he received an education suited to the course of life he was intended to pursue, and at the age of seventeen was placed as an apprentice in a mercantile house at Lisbon. Here Hanway conceived a passion for a lady then renowned for her beauty and accomplishments; but being unsuccessful in his love, he for ever renounced all idea of marriage, though he continued to the latest hour of his life an ardent advocate and admirer of womankind. Shortly after the expiration of his apprenticeship he returned to London.