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 bookseller,
thought it would be worth while to print a translation. Hector
joined in urging Johnson to undertake it, for a payment of five
guineas. Although nearly brought to a stop midway by hypochondriac
despondency, a little suggestion that the printers also were
stopped, and if they had not their work had not their pay, caused
Johnson to go on to the end.
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