Seven Unpublished Letters of James Bruce of Kinnaird

Abstract

IN 1924, the Society acquired from Dr. R. C. Macfie seven letters of James Bruce of Kinnaird which have recently been included in the Society's catalogu of archives. With one exception, they are in Bruce's hand. Six of them are addressed to Mr. John Mackenzie of Delvine, W. S., whose correspondence is to be found in the National Library of Scotland, Delvine MSS. Mackenzie was Bruce's legal adviser and 'commissioner' in Edinburgh and, in his own sphere, he seems to have been no less a 'character' than Bruce himself. Since Bruce was a keen litigant, as these letters show, he must also have been a valuable client for Mackenzie. The bulk of James Bruce's papers crossed the Atlantic in 1929 and now belong to the Paul Mellon Foundation. They comprise a considerable quantity of letters, journals, notebooks, drawings, etc, and it is understood that they will be the subject of research at Yale University. Bruce's manuscript for his book Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768 . . . 1773, published in 1790, has been presented by the Earl of Elgin to the National Library of Scotland. The important collection of Ethiopic MSS brought back by Bruce from his travels were purchased by the Bodleian Library, except for a specially prepared copy of the Book of Enoch, the fiist to reach Europe, which Bruce presented to Louis XV in 1774. The Book of Enoch was preserved in the Ethiopic version only. Although the second edition of Bruce's Travels, edited in 1804 DY Alexander Murray, Pro? fessor of Oriental Languages at Edinburgh University, contains a number of Bruce's letters in its appendixes, they are mostly examples of his official or formal corres? pondence. The letters in the Society's archives are more personal. At least three of his biographers?Murray in 1804, Playfair in 1877 and Reid in 1968?had access to the papers that have crossed the Atlantic but none of them claim to have given them full analytical examination. Probably Murray came closest to doing so, but it is not difficult to deduce that he was under constraint to omit matters of personal and family significance. How far the papers now in America have been the subject of family censorship remains to be seen. Within these limitations, if they have been as real as one suspects, Bruce has been well served by his principal biographers. They had some splendid material before them. In addition to the autobiographical passages in the introduction to his book, Bruce left another autobiography of 86 long folio pages intended for his friend, Daines Barrington. It deals sharply with the reception his book had received and is marked 'Memoirs of One Unknown', the kind of affectation that made Bruce vulnerable to his many critics. Independent evidence on Bruce's career in Britain and Europe is not lacking; it is almost totally absent for the five years that elapsed between his arrival in Egypt and his return there after travelling to the source of the Blue Nile. The earliest letter in the Society's archives is the copy of one written by Bruce to Mackenzie on 19 October 1758 from an address in Mark Lane, London. He was then 27 years of age and a partner in a firm of wine merchants. His translation from the modest estate in Stirlingshire where he was born, to the heart of commer-