Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/414

 exercise of arms, patience, perseverance, and every military virtue that could be acquired; and had passed the first of his life as a private person, in the midst of hardships and dangers.

is celebrated to this day in Abyssinia for a talent, which seems to be the gift of nature, that of choosing upon the first view the proper ground for the camp or battle, and embracing, in his own mind in a moment, all the advantages and disadvantages that could result from any particular part of it. This talent is particularly recorded in several short proverbs, or military adages, such as the following: "Blind him first, or you shall never beat him." This most material qualification seemed to have been in part transmitted to Ras Michael, the great general in my time, descended from Socinios by his mother; and, by this superiority. alone over the other commanders opposed to him, he is said to have been victorious in forty-three pitched battles. embraced the Catholic religion from conviction, and studied it with great application, as far as his narrow means of instruction would allow him; and there can be no doubt that, under the moderate conduct of Peter Paez, who converted him, he would have died a martyr for that religion; and there seems as little reason to doubt, conscientious as he was, if he had been a young man he would have quitted it for the good of his country, and from his inability to suffer the tyranny of the patriarch Alphonfo Mendes, and his continual encroachment upon civil government. Being, in the last years of his life, left without one soldier to draw his sword for the Catholic cause, he kept his religion, and abandoned his crown; and having been, it should seem, for some time convinced that the government