society of his wife and his paragon among huntsmen, Roesemeyer, for whose particular benefit he maintained a fine pack of hounds.  He kept open house, and loved to divert his guests with stories, not in the braggart vein of Dugald Dalgetty, but so embellished with palpably extravagant lies as to crack with a humour that was all their own.  The manner has been appropriated by Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, but it was invented by Munchausen.  Now the stories mainly relate to sporting adventures, and it has been asserted by one contemporary of the baron that Munchausen contracted the habit of drawing such a long-bow as a measure of self-defence against his invaluable but loquacious henchman, the worthy Roesemeyer.  But it is more probable, as is hinted in the first preface, that Munchausen, being a shrewd man, found the practice a sovereign specific against bores and all other kinds of serious or irrelevant people, while it naturally endeared him to the friends of whom he had no small number.

He told his stories with imperturbable sang froid, in a dry manner, and with perfect naturalness and simplicity.  He spoke as a man of the world, without circumlocution; his adventures were numerous and perhaps singular, but only such as might have been expected to happen to a man of so much experience.  A smile never traversed his face as he related the least credible of his tales, which the less intimate of his acquaintance began in time to think he meant to be taken seriously.  In short, so strangely entertaining were both manner and matter of his narratives, that “Munchausen’s Stories” became a by-word among a host of appreciative acquaintance.  Among these was Raspe, who years afterwards, when he was starving in London, bethought himself of the incomparable baron.  He half remembered some of his sporting stories, and supplemented these by gleanings from his own commonplace book.  The result is a curious medley, which testifies clearly to learning and wit, and also to the turning over of musty old books of facetiae written in execrable Latin.

The story of the Baron’s horse being cut in two by the descending portcullis of a besieged town, and the horseman’s innocence of the fact until, upon reaching a fountain in the midst of the city, the insatiate thirst of the animal betrayed his deficiency in hind quarters, was probably derived by Raspe from the Facetiae Bebelianae of Heinrich Bebel, first published at Strassburgh in 1508.

There it is given as follows:  “De Insigni Mendacio.  Faber clavicularius quem superius fabrum mendaciorum dixi, narravit se tempore belli, credens suos se subsecuturos equitando ad cujusdam oppidi portas penetrasse:  et cum ad portas venisset cataractam turre demissam, equum suum post ephippium discidisse, dimidiatumque reliquisse, atque se media parte equi ad forum usque oppidi equitasse, et caedem non modicam peregisse.  Sed cum retrocedere vellet multitudine hostium obrutus, tum demum equum cecidisse seque captum fuisse.”