had gone there, he says, to "study aesthetics." But this did not take
up all his time, for, during the intervals of attending classes, he
managed to see something of Lola Montez. "I must," he says, "have had
a great moral influence on her, for, so far as I am aware, I am the
only friend she ever had at whom she never threw a plate or a book, or
attacked with a dagger, poker, broom, or other deadly weapon.... I
always had a strange and great respect for her singular talents. There
were few, indeed, if any there, were, who really knew the depths of
that wild Irish soul."

In another passage Leland offers further details: "The great, the
tremendous, celebrity at that time in Munich was also an opera dancer,
though not on the stage. This was Lola Montez, the King's last
favourite.... She wished to run the whole kingdom and government, kick
out the Jesuits, and kick up the devil, generally speaking.

"One of her most intimate friends was wont to tell her that she and I
had many very strange characteristics in common, which we shared with
no one else, while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very
like both of us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul
against an atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of the most
varied kind, till she came to an old vellum-bound copy of _Apuleius_,
and proceed to establish her views according to his subtle
neo-Platonism. But she romanced and embroidered so much in
conversation that she did not get credit for what she really knew."

Well, if it comes to that, Leland for his part was not above
"romancing" and "embroidering." His books are full of these qualities.
"Marvels," says a biographer, "fill his descriptions of student life
at Munich. Interesting people figure in his reminiscences....
Prominent among them was Lola Montez, the King's favourite of the day,
cordially hated by all Munich for an interference in public affairs,
hardly to be expected from the 'very small, pale, and thin or _frele_
little person with beautiful blue eyes and curly black hair' who flits
across the pages of the Memoirs."

If this were Leland's real opinion of Lola's appearance, he must have
formed it after drinking too much of the Munich beer of which he was
so fond. He seems to have drunk a good deal at times, as he admits in
one passage: "after the dinner and wine, I drank twelve _schoppens_."
A dozen imperial pints would take some swallowing, and not leave the
memory unclouded