life can witness, that he retained that faculty in the greatest vigour.

From the university, Johnson returned to Lichfield. His father died soon
after, December, 1731; and the whole receipt out of his effects, as
appeared by a memorandum in the son's handwriting, dated 15th of June,
1732, was no more than twenty pounds[d]. In this exigence, determined
that poverty should neither depress his spirits nor warp his integrity,
he became under-master of a grammar school at Market Bosworth, in
Leicestershire. That resource, however, did not last long. Disgusted by
the pride of sir Wolstan Dixie, the patron of that little seminary, he
left the place in discontent, and ever after spoke of it with
abhorrence. In 1733, he went on a visit to Mr. Hector, who had been his
schoolfellow, and was then a surgeon at Birmingham, lodging at the house
of Warren, a bookseller. At that place Johnson translated a Voyage to
Abyssinia, written by Jerome Lobo, a Portuguese missionary. This was the
first literary work from the pen of Dr. Johnson. His friend, Hector, was
occasionally his amanuensis. The work was, probably, undertaken at the
desire of Warren, the bookseller, and was printed at Birmingham; but it
appears, in the Literary Magazine, or history of the works of the
learned, for March, 1735, that it was published by Bettesworth and
Hitch, Paternoster row. It contains a narrative of the endeavours of a
company of missionaries to convert the people of Abyssinia to the church
of Rome. In the preface to this work, Johnson observes, "that the
Portuguese traveller, contrary to the general view of his countrymen,
has amused his readers with no romantick absurdities, or incredible
fictions. He appears, by his modest and unaffected narration, to have
described things, as he saw them; to have copied nature from the life;
and to have consulted his senses, not his imagination. He meets with no
basilisks, that destroy with their eyes; his crocodiles devour their
prey, without tears; and his cataracts fall from the rock, without