t 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 paid by the Portuguese to their
countrymen, by the Jesuits to their society, and by the Papists to their
church, nor aggravates the vices of the Abyssins; but if the reader will
not be satisfied with a Popish account of a Popish mission, he may have
recourse to the history of the church of Abyssinia, written by Dr.
Geddes, in which he will find the actions and sufferings of the
missionaries placed in a different light, though the same in which Mr. Le
Grand, with all his zeal for the Roman church, appears to have seen them.

This learned dissertator, however valuable for his industry and
erudition, is yet more to be esteemed for having dared so freely in th