spe during this part of his
life also wrote papers on lithography and upon musical instruments, and
translated Algarotti's Treatise on "Architecture, Painting, and Opera
Music," enough will have been said to make manifest his very remarkable
and somewhat prolix versatility. In 1773 he made a tour in Westphalia in
quest of MSS., and on his return, by way of completing his education,
he turned journalist, and commenced a periodical called the _Cassel
Spectator_, with Mauvillon as his co-editor. In 1775 he was travelling
in Italy on a commission to collect articles of vertu for the landgrave,
and it was apparently soon after his return that he began appropriating
to his own use valuable coins abstracted from the cabinets entrusted
to his care. He had no difficulty in finding a market for the antiques
which he wished to dispose of, and which, it has been charitably
suggested, he had every intention of replacing whenever opportunity
should serve. His consequent procedure was, it is true, scarcely that of
a hardened criminal. Having obtained the permission of the landgrave to
visit Berlin, he sent the keys of his cabinet back to the authorities
at Cassel--and disappeared. His thefts, to the amount of two thousand
rixdollars, were promptly discovered, and advertisements were issued
for the arrest of the Councillor Raspe, described without suspicion of
flattery as a long-faced man, with small eyes, crooked nose, red hair
under a stumpy periwig, and a jerky gait. The necessities that prompted
him to commit a felony are possibly indicated by the addition that he
usually appeared in a scarlet dress embroidered with gold, but sometimes
in black, blue, or grey clothes. He was seized when he had got no
farther than Klausthal, in the Hartz mountains, but he lost no time in
escaping from the clutches of the police, and made his way to England.
He never again set foot on the continent.

He was already an excellent English scholar, so that when he reached
London it was not unnatural that he should look to authorship for
support. Without loss of time, he published in London in 1776 a volume
on some German Volcanoes and their productions; in 1777 he translated
the then highly esteemed mineralogical travels of Ferber in Italy and
Hungary. In 1780 we have an interesting account of him from Horace
Walpole, who wrote to his friend, the Rev. William Mason: "There is a
Dutch scavant come over who is author of several pieces so learned that
I do