upported by the small income from the shop. He held one miserable teaching job for a few months and applied unsuccessfully for others where he was rejected because it was thought his strange appearance would cause him to be laughed at by the pupils. He went to live with a former schoolfellow in Birmingham, where he found occasional employment on the local newspaper, and published a set of proposals (1734, nonextant) for an edition of the poetry of the Italian Renaissance writer Politian, with a life of Politian, and a history of Renaissance Latin poetry from Petrarch to Politian. Nothing came of this, but a windfall of sorts was a commission to translate from the French A Voyage to Abyssinia by the Portuguese Jesuit Jernimo Lobo, with additional essays on the geography and customs of the country by Joachim Le Grand. Published in 1735, this first book of Johnson's is of considerable interest. In the early seventeenth century, Portugal, in order to make its trade routes to India more secure, sponsored a Jesuit missionary expedition to Ethiopia, in the hope of converting its rulers from their ancient and, as the Jesuits thought, corrupt form of Christianity to Roman Catholicism and hence to bring the country more firmly under Portuguese influence. Lobo and Le Grand give a vivid account of this nearly unknown part of the world, supposedly the land of Prester John and the mysterious source of the Nile. Johnson's preface dwells on two themes that were to recur in his later work: he compliments Lobo on the honesty with which he, unlike other travel writers, has "described things as he saw them ... copied na...
