rsity
course which may possibly help to explain his subsequent aberrations.
The connection cannot have lasted long, as in 1762, having already
obtained reputation as a student of natural history and antiquities,
he obtained a post as one of the clerks in the University Library at
Hanover.

No later than the following year contributions written in elegant
Latin are to be found attached to his name in the Leipsic _Nova Acta
Eruditorum_. In 1764 he alluded gracefully to the connection between
Hanover and England in a piece upon the birthday of Queen Charlotte, and
having been promoted secretary of the University Library at Goettingen,
the young savant commenced a translation of Leibniz's philosophical
works which was issued in Latin and French after the original MSS. in
the Royal Library at Hanover, with a preface by Raspe's old college
friend Kaestner (Goettingen, 1765). At once a courtier, an antiquary,
and a philosopher, Raspe next sought to display his vocation for polite
letters, by publishing an ambitious allegorical poem of the age of
chivalry, entitled "Hermin and Gunilde," which was not only exceedingly
well reviewed, but received the honour of a parody entitled "Harlequin
and Columbine." He also wrote translations of several of the poems of
Ossian, and a disquisition upon their genuineness; and then with better
inspiration he wrote a considerable treatise on "Percy's Reliques of
Ancient Poetry," with metrical translations, being thus the first to
call the attention of Germany to these admirable poems, which were
afterwards so successfully ransacked by Buerger, Herder, and other early
German romanticists.

In 1767 Raspe was again advanced by being appointed Professor at the
Collegium Carolinum in Cassel, and keeper of the landgrave of Hesse's
rich and curious collection of antique gems and medals. He was shortly
afterwards appointed Librarian in the same city, and in 1771 he married.
He continued writing on natural history, mineralogy, and archaeology, and
in 1769 a paper in the 59th volume of the Philosophical Transactions,
on the bones and teeth of elephants and other animals found in North
America and various boreal regions of the world, procured his election
as an honorary member of the Royal Society of London. His conclusion in
this paper that large elephants or mammoths must have previously existed
in boreal regions has, of course, been abundantly justified by later
investigations. When it is added that Ra