Ethiopia -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800; Lobo, Jerónimo, 1596?-1678 -- Travel -- Ethiopia
resource, as when he tells of the taste of the Abyssinians for raw cow's
flesh, with a sauce high in royal Abyssinian favour, made of the cow's
gall and contents of its entrails, of which, when he was pressed to
partake, he could only excuse himself and his brethren by suggesting that
it was too good for such humble missionaries. Out of distinguished
respect for it, they refrained from putting it into their mouths.
Good Father Lobo gave up the desire of his heart, when it was proved
unattainable, and returned to India six years after the breaking up of
his work in Abyssinia, at the age of forty-seven. He came to be head of
the Provincials of the Jesuit settlement at Goa, and after about 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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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