hey have not felt it incumbent upon them to
support their own views or to combat those of other people. It has,
moreover, been frequently stated with equal confidence and inaccuracy
that the authorship has never been settled. An early and persistent
version of the genesis of the travels was that they took their origin
from the rivalry in fabulous tales of three accomplished students at
Goettingen University, Buerger, Kaestner, and Lichtenberg; another ran that
Gottfried August Buerger, the German poet and author of "Lenore," had at
a later stage of his career met Baron Munchausen in Pyrmont and taken
down the stories from his own lips. Percy in his anecdotes attributes
the Travels to a certain Mr. M. (Munchausen also began with an M.)
who was imprisoned at Paris during the Reign of Terror. Southey in his
"Omniana" conjectured, from the coincidences between two of the tales
and two in a Portuguese periodical published in 1730, that the English
fictions must have been derived from the Portuguese. William West the
bookseller and numerous followers have stated that Munchausen owed its
first origin to Bruce's Travels, and was written for the purpose of
burlesquing that unfairly treated work. Pierer boldly stated that it was
a successful anonymous satire upon the English government of the day,
while Meusel with equal temerity affirmed in his "Lexikon" that the book
was a translation of the "well-known Munchausen lies" executed from a
(non-existent) German original by Rudolph Erich Raspe. A writer in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1856 calls the book the joint production of
Buerger and Raspe.

Of all the conjectures, of which these are but a selection, the most
accurate from a German point of view is that the book was the work of
Buerger, who was the first to dress the Travels in a German garb, and
was for a long time almost universally credited with the sole
proprietorship. Buerger himself appears neither to have claimed nor
disclaimed the distinction. There is, however, no doubt whatever that
the book first appeared in English in 1785, and that Buerger's German
version did not see the light until 1786. The first German edition
(though in reality printed at Goettingen) bore the imprint London,
and was stated to be derived from an English source; but this was,
reasonably enough, held to be merely a measure of precaution in case the
actual Baron Munchausen (who was a well-known personage in Goettingen)
should be stupid enough t