I am next blamed for not giving a connected history of the mission; the proper answer to which is, that I never undertook to give it. I have not entitled my book "the History of an Eighteen Months' Residence in Shoa," but have said that my observations were collected _during_ an eighteen months' residence there. They are not all my observations, nor have I arranged them chronologically; therefore, though the reviewer feels disappointed, he has no right to quarrel with me. He expected one thing--I published another; simply because I did not write for him, or such as he, but for the public. As it is, however, I am not sorry that he is "tantalised," which he would not be if he possessed one-tenth of the knowledge to which he obliquely lays claim. On most points he is profoundly ignorant, and it suits my purpose to leave him so. Any information that I can impart, without prejudice to the public service, it is doubtless my duty to give; and accordingly, in this second edition, I have stated some facts not recorded in the first. In most cases, indeed, men publish a first edition as an _experiment_, to ascertain how far their views of what information the public needs are correct, that they may afterwards diligently, and to the best of their power, supply it. The Mission, it is said, has been "a complete failure." But how is this proved? By a scrap extracted from some anonymous correspondent to a newspaper, who writes, not from Angollala or Ankober, but from Cairo, which is nearly as though a person residing in Saint Petersburgh were to write authoritatively to China respecting what is going on in Lisbon. But it does not follow that the Mission has been a failure, because some Cairo gossip chooses to say so, or because all the fruits of it have not yet been reaped. A treaty has been concluded, friendly relations have been established, and upon this basis commerce will proceed, slowly perhaps, but surely, to erect its structure. It will be for the next generation to determine whether or not the mission was "a complete failure." A reviewer residing in the purlieus of High Holborn is not competent to do it.