1856-57] FIRST VISIT HOME. 209 



iitted to record the incidents of a journey — sometimes 

 poetical in its vivid pictures, often brightening into 

 humour, and sometimes deepening into pathos. Viewing 

 it page by page, the style of the Missionary Travels 

 is ad mir able, the chief defect being want of perspective ; 

 the book is more a collection of pieces than an organised 

 whole : a fault inevitable, perhaps, in some measure, from 

 its nature, but aggravated, as we believe, by the haste 

 and pressure under which it had to be written. In his 

 earlier private letters, Livingstone, in his single-hearted 

 desire to rouse the world on the subject of Africa, used 

 to regret that he could not write in such a way as to 

 command general attention : had he been master of the 

 flowing periods of the Edinburgh Review, he thought he 

 could have done much more good. In point of fact, if he 

 had had the pen of Samuel Johnson, or the tongue of 

 Edmund Burke, he would not have made the impression he 

 did. His simple style and plain speech were eminently in 

 hamiony with his truthful, unexaggerating nature, and 

 showed that he neither wrote nor spoke for effect, but 

 simply to utter truth. What made his work of composi- 

 tion irksome was, on the one hand, the fear that he was 

 not doing it well, and on the other, the necessity of doing 

 it quickly. He had always a dread that his English was 

 not up to the critical mark, and yet he was obliged to 

 hurry on, and leave the English as it dropped from his 

 pen. He had no time to plan, to shape, to organise ; the 

 architectural talent could not be brought into play. Add 

 to this that he had been so accustomed to open-air life 

 and physical exercise, that the close air and sedentary 

 attitude of the study must have been exceedingly irk- 

 some ; so that it is hardly less wonderful that his health 

 stood the confinement of bookmaking in England, than 

 that it survived the tear and wear, labour and sorrow, of 

 all his journeys in Africa. 



An extract from a letter to Mr. Maclear, on the eve 



o 



