Above 1200 years, these people were unknown, till Vasques de Gama discovered their coast, and called them the civil or kind nation. By some lucky revolution in that long period, when they were left to themselves, they seem most unaccountably to have changed both their diet and their manners. The Portuguese conquered them, built towns among them, and, if they met with conspiracies and treachery, these all originated in a mixture of Moors from Spain and Portugal, Europeans that had settled among them, and not among the natives themselves. No man-eaters appeared till after the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, when that of the new world, which followed it, made the Portuguese abandon their settlements in the old; and this coast came as unknown to them as it had been to the Romans, when they traded only to Raptum and Prassum, and made Anthropophagi of all the rest. One would be almost tempted to believe that Jerome Lobo was a man-eater himself, and had taught this custom to these savages. They had it not before his coming; they have never had it since; and it must have been with some sinister intention like this, that a stranger would voluntarily seek a nation of man-eaters. It is nonsense to say, that a traveller could propose, as Lobo did, going into a far distant country, such as Abyssinia, under so very questionable a protection as a man-eater. I will not take up my own, or the reader’s time, in going through the multitude of errors in geography to be found in this book of Lobo’s; I have given the reader my opinion of the author from the original, before I saw the translation. I said it was a heap of fables, and full of ignorance and presumption; and I confess myself disappointed that it has come from so celebrated a hand as the translator, so very little amended, if indeed it can be said to be amended at all. Dr Johnson, in the preface to the book, expresses himself in these words:--“The Portuguese traveller (Jerome Lobo, his original) has amused his reader with no romantic absurdities, or incredible fictions. He seems 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; and his cataracts fall from the rock, without deafening the neighbouring inhabitants.”