custom of feeding upon "live bulls and kava" provoked a chorus of
incredulity. The traveller was ridiculed upon the stage as Macfable, and
in a cloud of ephemeral productions; nor is the following allusion in
Peter Pindar obscure:--

"Nor have I been where men (what loss alas!)
Kill half a cow, then send the rest to grass."

The way in which Bruce resented the popular scepticism is illustrated
by the following anecdote told by Sir Francis Head, his biographer. A
gentleman once observed, at a country house where Bruce was staying,
that it was not possible that the natives of Abyssinia could eat raw
meat! "Bruce said not a word, but leaving the room, shortly returned
from the kitchen with a piece of raw beef-steak, peppered and salted in
the Abyssinian fashion. 'You will eat that, sir, or fight me,' he said.
When the gentleman had eaten up the raw flesh (most willingly would he
have eaten his words instead), Bruce calmly observed, 'Now, sir, you
will never again say it is _impossible_.'" In reality, Bruce seems to
have been treated with much the same injustice as Herodotus. The truth
of the bulk of his narrative has been fully established, although a
passion for the picturesque may certainly have led him to embellish many
of the minor particulars. And it must be remembered, that his book was
not dictated until twelve years after the events narrated.

Apart from Bruce, however, the sequel, like the previous continuation,
contains a great variety of political, literary, and other allusions of
the most purely topical character--Dr. Johnson's Tour in the Hebrides,
Mr. Pitt, Burke's famous pamphlet upon the French Revolution, Captain
Cook, Tippoo Sahib (who had been brought to bay by Lord Cornwallis
between 1790 and 1792). The revolutionary pandemonium in Paris, and