y. This was the
first literary work from the pen of Dr. Johnson. His friend, Hector, was
occasionally his amanuensis. The work was, probably, undertaken at the
desire of Warren, the bookseller, and was printed at Birmingham; but it
appears, in the Literary Magazine, or history of the works of the
learned, for March, 1735, that it was published by Bettesworth and
Hitch, Paternoster row. It contains a narrative of the endeavours of a
company of missionaries to convert the people of Abyssinia to the church
of Rome. In the preface to this work, Johnson observes, "that the
Portuguese traveller, contrary to the general view of his countrymen,
has amused his readers with no romantick absurdities, or incredible
fictions. 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 void 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."--We
have here an early specimen of Johnson's manner; the vein of thinking,
and the frame of the sentences, are manifestly his: we see the infant
Hercules. The translation of Lobo's narrative has been reprinted lately
in a separate volume, with some other tracts of Dr. Johnson's, and,
therefore, forms no part of this edition; but a compendious account of
so interesting a work, as father Lobo's discovery of the head of the
Nile, will not, it is imagined, be unacceptable to the reader.

"Father Lobo, the Portuguese missionary, embarked, in 1622, in the same
fleet with the