power was deaf to his pleading. He removed
the appeal to Lisbon, and after narrowly escaping on the way from a
shipwreck, and after having been captured by pirates, he reached Lisbon,
and sought still to obtain means of overawing the force hostile to the
work of the Jesuits in Abyssinia. The Princess Margaret gave friendly
hearing, but sent him on to persuade, if he could, the King of Spain; and
failing at Madrid, he went to Rome and tried the Pope. He was chosen to
go to the Pope, said the Patriarch Alfonso Mendez, because, of all the
brethren at Goa, the 'Pater Hieronymus Lupus' (Lobo translated into Wolf)
was the most ingenious and learned in all sciences, with a mind most
generous in its desire to conquer difficulties, dexterous in management
of business, and found most able to make himself agreeable to those with
whom there was business to be done. The vigour with which he held by his
purpose of endeavouring in every possible way to bring the Christianity
of Abyssinia within the pale of the Catholic Church is in accordance with
the character that makes the centre of the story of this book. Whimsical
touches arise out of this strength of character and readiness of
resource, as when he tells of the taste of the Abyssinians for raw cow's
flesh, with a sauce high in royal Abyssinian favour, made of the cow's
gall and contents of its entrails, of which, when he was pressed to
partake, he could only excuse himself and his brethren by suggesting that
it was too good for such humble missionaries. 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