men, 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.