BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 131
a raw beef-steak, peppered and salted in the Abyssinian fashion. “ You will
be pleased to eat this,” he said, “or fight me.” The gentleman preferred
the former alternative, and with no good grace contrived to swallow the proffered
delicacy. When he had finished, Bruce calmly observed, “ Now, sir,
you will never again say it is impossi61e.”
Bruce was a man of uncommonly large stature, six feet four inches, and latterly
very corpulent. With a turban on his head, and a long staff in his hand,
he usually travelled about his grounds ; and his gigantic figure in these excursions
is still remembered in the neighbourhood. On the 20th of May 1776,
he took as his second wife, Mary, daughter of Thomas Dundas of Fingask,
by Lady Janet Maitland, daughter of Charles sixth Earl of Lauderdale.
On the 26th of April 1794, after entertaining a large party to dinner, as he
was hurrying to assist a lady to her carriage, his foot slipped, and he fell headlong
from the sixth or seventh step of the large staircase to the lobby. He was
taken up in a state of insensibility, though without any visible contusion, and
died early next morning, in the sixty-fourth year of his age.
Thus he who had undergone such dangers, and was placed often in such imminent
peril, lost his life by an accidental fall. He left, by his second marriage,
a son and a daughter. His son succeeded him in his paternal estate, and died
in 1810, leaving an only daughter, who married Charles Cumming of h ~ e i l s e ,
a younger son of the family of Altyre, who assumed the name of Bruce, and is
presently (1 837) member of Parliament for the Inverness district of burghs.
His daughter, who survived him many years, became the wife of John Jardine,
Esq., advocate, sheriff of Ross and Cromarty.
Bruce took with him in his travels a telescope so large that it required six
men to carry it. He assigned the following reason to a friend by whom the
anecdote was communicated :-“ That, exclusive of its utility, it inspired the
nations through which he passed with great awe, as they thought he had some
immediate connection with Heaven, and they paid more attention to it than they
did to himself.”
PETER WILLIAMSON, the second figure in this Print was born of poor
parents at Hirnley, in the parish of Aboyne, county of Aberdeen, North
Britain. When still very young he was sent to reside with an aunt in Aberdeen,
as he tells us in his autobiography,’- “where, at eight years of age, playing
one day on the quay with others of my companions, I was taken notice of by
two fellows belonging to a vessel in the harbour, employed, as the trade then
was, by some of the worthy merchants of the town, in that villanous and execrable
practice called kidnapping, that is, stealing young children from their
parents, and selling them as slaves in the plantations abroad. Being marked out
by these monsters as their prey, I was cajoled on board the ship by them, where
1 Vide ‘‘ French and Indian Cruelty, exemplified in the Life and rarious Vicissitudes of Fortune
of Peter Willismson, etc., dedicated to the Right Hon. William Pitt, Esq. Written by himself.
Third edition, with considerable Impmvements. Glasgow : printed by J, Bryce and I). Pateraon,
for the benefit of the unfortunate Author, 1758.”
