[Footnote 11: _The Story of Kaspar Hauser from Authentic Records._
Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1892.]

On all sides, indeed, the evidence as to Kaspar Hauser is in
bewildering confusion. In 1832, four years after his appearance, a
book about him was published by Paul John Anselm Von Feuerbach. The
man was mortal, had been a professor, and, though a legal reformer and
a learned jurist, was 'a nervous invalid' when he wrote, and he soon
after died of paralysis (or poison according to Kasparites). He was
approaching a period of life in which British judges write books to
prove that Bacon was Shakespeare, and his arguments were like theirs.
His _Kaspar Hauser_ is composed in a violently injudicial style. 'To
seek the giant perpetrator of such a crime' (as the injustice to
Kaspar), 'it would be necessary ... to be in possession of Joshua's
ram's horns, or at least of Oberon's horn, in order, for some time at
least, to suspend the activity of the powerful enchanted Colossi that
guard the golden gates of certain castles,' that is, of the palace at
Karlsruhe. Such early Nuremberg records of Kaspar's first exploits as
existed were ignored by Feuerbach, who told Lord Stanhope, that any
reader of these 'would conceive Kaspar to be an impostor.' 'They ought
to be burned.' The records, which were read and in part published, by
the younger Meyer (son of one of Kaspar's tutors) and by President
Karl Schmausz, have disappeared, and, in 1883, Schmausz could only
attest the general accuracy of Meyer's excerpts from the town's
manuscripts.

Taking Feuerbach's romantic narrative of 1832, we find him averring
that, about 4.30 P.M. on Whit Monday, May 26, 1828, a citizen,
unnamed, was loitering at his door, in the Unschlitt Plas, Nuremberg,
intending to sally out by the New Gate, when he saw a young peasant,