long studied the art of gunnery'; he does
away (in his third edition) with the French persecutors of Marie
Antoinette. He, always he, is the actor; he is not the chief actor, he
is the sole actor, and the rest of the world is the audience.

So simply and singly does he believe in himself that his gigantic
quality is assured. He disdains to imitate; when confined in the belly
of the great fish he does not wait like Sindbad, or wait and pray like
Jonah: Baron Muenchausen dances a hornpipe. He is quite sure that he will
escape from the fish: the fish is large, but not large enough to contain
the spirit of a Muenchausen; and he is sure that the story is true. There
is nothing in any adventure to show that the Baron doubted its accuracy,
and we must not conclude from his threat in Chapter VIII.: 'If any
gentleman will say he doubts the truth of this story, I will fine him a
gallon of brandy and make him drink it at one draught,' that he knew
himself for a liar. As a man of the world he recognised that his were
wonderful stories, and he expected to encounter unbelief, but he did not
encounter it within himself. No, Muenchausen accepted his own enormity,
gravely believed that he 'made it a rule always to speak within
compass.' If he winked at the world as he told his tales it was not
because he did not believe in them; he winked because he was gay and,
mischievously enough, liked to keep the world on the tenterhooks of
scepticism and gullibility. He did not even truckle to his audience, try
to be in any way consistent; thus, when entangled with the eagle he
rides in the branches of a tree, he dares not jump for fear of being
killed ... while he has previously fallen with impunity some five miles,
on his descent from the moon, with such violence as to dig a hole nine
fathoms deep.

No, this precursor of Bill Adams, who saved Gibraltar for General
Elliott, simply believed. Like Falstaff, like Tartarin, he suffered from
mirage; though some of his adventures are dreams, monstrous pictures of
facts so small that we cannot imagine them, others are but the
distortions of absolutely historic affairs. No doubt Muenchausen saw a
lion fight a crocodile: it needed no gigantic flight for him to believe
that he cut off the lion's head while it was still alive, if he actually
cut it off 'to make sure' when it was dead; and though he did not tie
his horse to a snow-surrounded steeple, he may have tied him to a post
and found, in the morning