actual Baron Munchausen (who was a well-known personage in Göttingen)
should be stupid enough to feel aggrieved at being made the butt of a
gross caricature. In this way the discrepancy of dates mentioned above
might easily have been obscured, and Bürger might still have been
credited with a work which has proved a better protection against
oblivion than "Lenore," had it not been for the officious sensitiveness
of his self-appointed biographer, Karl von Reinhard. Reinhard, in an
answer to an attack made upon his hero for bringing out Munchausen as
a pot-boiler in German and English simultaneously, definitely stated in
the _Berlin Gesellschafters_ of November 1824, that the real author of
the original work was that disreputable genius, Rudolph Erich Raspe, and
that the German work was merely a free translation made by Bürger from
the fifth edition of the English work. Bürger, he stated, was well aware
of, but was too high-minded to disclose the real authorship.

Taking Reinhard's solemn asseveration in conjunction with the
ascertained facts of Raspe's career, his undoubted acquaintance with the
Baron Munchausen of real life and the first appearance of the work in
1785, when Raspe was certainly in England, there seems to be little
difficulty in accepting his authorship as a positive fact. There is no
difficulty whatever, in crediting Raspe with a sufficient mastery of
English idiom to have written the book without assistance, for as early
as January 1780 (since which date Raspe had resided uninterruptedly
in this country) Walpole wrote to his friend Mason that "Raspe writes
English much above ill and speaks it as readily as French," and shortly
afterwards he remarked that he wrote English "surprisingly well." In
the next year, 1781, Raspe's absolute command of the two languages
encouraged him to publish two moderately good prose-translations, one of
Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," and the other of Zachariae's Mock-heroic,
"Tabby in Elysium." The erratic character of the punctuation may be