I have endeavoured to represent his life, adventures, character and aims, with the accuracy of fact; though in one instance I have imagined a scene characteristic of a phase of African experience, which would otherwise have remained unillustrated; but this is a kind of experience which Livingstone might easily have passed through personally; and of course I have exercised a privilege of selection. The scene of the first Cantos is laid at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika; where Livingstone has been driven back by the malice or cowardice of some who followed him, when on the eve, as he believed, of solving for ever those grand problems of geography, which have engaged the world's attention from earliest ages.
He has arrived ill, worn-out, aged, destitute; to find the goods on which he depended dissipated by the rascal to whom they had unfortunately been entrusted; and he could, (suffering as he was from his old disease, dysentery,) hardly have held out much longer, had not Mr. Stanley so gallantly and unexpectedly relieved him.
