“The place which the wisdom or policy of antiquity had destined for the residence of the Abyssinian Princes was a spacious valley in the kingdom of Amhara, surrounded on every side by mountains, of which the summits overhang the middle part. The only passage by which it could be entered, was a cavern that passed under a rock, of which it has long been disputed whether it was the work of nature, or of human industry. The outlet of the cavern was concealed by a thick wood, and the mouth which opened into the valley was closed with gates of iron....
“This lake discharged its superfluities by a stream, which entered a dark cleft of the mountain on the northern side, and fell with dreadful noise from precipice to precipice, till it was heard no more.”
These descriptions agree sufficiently to leave no doubt that Johnson borrowed the idea of Rasselas from actual descriptions of Abyssinia, and from the translation of Alvarez in Purchas’s Pilgrimes, when he wrote that work in 1759; but the matter is proved beyond doubt, by the fact that Johnson’s first literary work was a translation from the French of Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia. It was published in 1735, by Bettesworth and Hicks, of Paternoster Row, and for this task Johnson received only five guineas, which he was in want of for the funeral expenses of his mother.
Therefore, whatever frivolous persons in society may have done on insufficient information, Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his History of our Own Times, should have avoided the inaccuracy of writing: “He (Lord Beaconsfield) wound up by proclaiming that ‘the standard of St. George was hoisted upon the mountains of Rasselas’. All England smiled at the mountains of Rasselas. The idea that Johnson actually had in his mind the very Abyssinia of geography and of history, when he described his Happy Valley, was in itself trying to gravity.”
Mr. McCarthy goes on to say that: “When the expedition to Abyssinia is mentioned in any company, a smile steals over some faces, and more than one voice is heard to murmur an allusion to the mountains of Rasselas”.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Justin McCarthy should not have fallen in with those Englishmen who sighed over the excuse for the expedition to Abyssinia, that “it would keep the Bombay army in wind”, or who reprobated the conduct of Lord Napier of Magdala to King Theodore, after having accepted from him a present of cows. But accurate ideas of political morality are not to be expected from an advocate of the most extreme proposals of the Irish Land League.[1]
The reader will find many descriptions of Abyssinian Ritual, and interesting discussions between the Abyssinians and Father Alvarez, who always showed much tact in these arguments.
It appears from this book, that the population of Abyssinia was far larger at that time than at the present; and that the contact of Europeans with the Abyssinians has not been to the advantage of the latter.
An interesting part of the narrative of Alvarez is the description of the churches cut out of the rock; he is very enthusiastic over the beauty of these structures. The style of Alvarez is never very clear; and there was much difficulty in translating this portion of his book, owing to the number of architectural terms, some of which are almost obsolete. No modern traveller has described these churches. Mr. Markham was within a short distance of them, but was unable to visit them.
M. Antoine d’Abbadie visited them, but he has not yet written any account of his long residence in Ethiopia, having been occupied with the publication of his very copious astronomical observations, and being now engaged in printing a dictionary of the Ethiopic language.