CE
TO THE TRANSLATION OF
FATHER LOBO'S VOYAGE TO ABYSSINIA[1].

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 romantick 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 blest 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 inconveniencies 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 Abyssinians; 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.
LeGrand, w