JOHNSON. 11 



French Father Lobo's 'Voyage to Abyssinia/ This work 

 has been carefully examined, to discover if any traces 

 can be perceived of his peculiar style; but nothing of 

 the kind appears. The preface, however, is as com- 

 pletely clothed in his diction as any of his subsequent 

 productions ; and shews that he had then, in his twenty- 

 fifth year, formed the habit of sturdily thinking for 

 himself and rejecting all marvellous stories, at least in 

 secular matters, which ever after distinguished him, as 

 well as of tersely and epigraminatieally expressing his 

 thoughts. Mr. Boswell and Mr. Burke examined this 

 piece together, and the following portion of the passage 

 on which they pitched as a proof of his early maturity 

 in that manner may serve to gratify the reader, and to 

 prove the truth of the foregoing remark. 



"This Traveller has consulted his senses and 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 rocks 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 natives here described 

 either devoid of all sense of humanity or consummate in 

 all private or social virtues. Here are no Hottentots 

 without religious piety or articulable language, no 

 Chinese perfectly polite and completely skilled in all 

 sciences ; he will discover what will always be discovered 

 by a diligent and impartial enquirer, that where 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 



