A Voyage to Abyssinia | Page 4

ten more
years of active duty in the East returned in 1658 to Lisbon, when he
died in the religious house of St. Roque in 1678, at the age of
eighty-five. A comrade of Father Lobo's, Baltazar Tellez, said that
Lobo had travelled thirty-eight thousand leagues with no other object
before him but the winning of more souls to God. His years in
Abyssinia stood out prominently to his mind among all the years of his
long life, and he wrote an account of them in Portuguese, of which the
manuscript is at Lisbon in the monastery of St. Roque, where he closed
his life.
Of that manuscript, then and still unprinted (though use was made of it
by Baltazar Tellez in his History of 'Ethiopia-Coimbra,' 1660), the
Abbe Legrand, Prior of Neuville-les-Dames, and of Prevessin,
published a translation into French. The Abbe Legrand had been to
Lisbon as Secretary to the Abbe d'Estrees, Ambassador from France to
Portugal. The negotiations were so long continued that M. Legrand was
detained five years in Lisbon, and employed the time in researches
among documents illustrating the Portuguese possessions in India and
the East. He obtained many memoirs of great interest, and published
from one of them an account of Ceylon; but of all the manuscripts he
found none interested him so much as that of Father Lobo. His
translation was augmented with illustrative dissertations, letters, and a
memoir on the circumstances of the death of M. du Roule. It filled two
volumes, or 636 pages of forty lines. This was published in 1728. It
was on the 31st of October, 1728, that Samuel Johnson, aged nineteen,
went to Pembroke College, Oxford, and Legrand's 'Voyage Historique
d'Abissinie du R. P. Jerome Lobo, de la Compagnie de Jesus, Traduit
du Portugais, continue et augmente de plusieurs Dissertations, Lettres
et Memoires,' was one of the new books read by Johnson during his
short period of college life. In 1735, when Johnson's age was
twenty-six, and the world seemed to have shut against him every door
of hope, Johnson stayed for six months at Birmingham with his old
schoolfellow Hector, who was aiming at medical practice, and who
lodged at the house of a bookseller. Johnson spoke with interest of
Father Lobo, whose book he had read at Pembroke College. Mr.
Warren, the bookseller, thought it would be worth while to print a
translation. Hector joined in urging Johnson to undertake it, for a

payment of five guineas. Although nearly brought to a stop midway by
hypochondriac despondency, a little suggestion that the printers also
were stopped, and if they had not their work had not their pay, caused
Johnson to go on to the end. Legrand's book was reduced to a fifth of
its size by the omission of all that overlaid Father Lobo's personal
account of his adventures; and Johnson began work as a writer with this
translation, first published at Birmingham in 1735. H.M.

THE PREFACE

The following relation is so curious and entertaining, and the
dissertations that accompany it so judicious and instructive, that the
translator is confident his attempt stands in need of no apology,
whatever censures may fall on the performance.
The Portuguese traveller, contrary to the general vein of his
countrymen, has amused his reader with no romantic absurdities or
incredible fictions; whatever he relates, whether true or not, is at least
probable; and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability
has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot
contradict him.
He appears by his modest and unaffected narration to have described
things as he saw them, to have copied nature from the life, and to have
consulted his senses, not his imagination; he meets with no basilisks
that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour their prey without
tears, and his cataracts fall from the rock without deafening the
neighbouring inhabitants.
The reader will here find no regions cursed with irremediable
barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity, no perpetual gloom
or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid
of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private and social
virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity, or articulate
language, no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all
sciences: he will discover, what will always be discovered by a diligent
and impartial inquirer, that wherever human nature is to be found there
is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason, and that
the Creator doth not appear partial in his distributions, but has balanced
in most countries their particular inconveniences by particular favours.

In his account of the mission, where his veracity is most to be
suspected, he neither exaggerates overmuch the merits of the Jesuits, if
we consider the partial regard