The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen | Page 7

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 sçavant come over who is author of several pieces so
learned that I do not even know their titles: but he has made a discovery
in my way which you may be sure I believe, for it proves what I
expected and hinted in my 'Anecdotes of Painting,' that the use of oil
colours was known long before Van Eyck." Raspe, he went on to say,
had discovered a MS. of Theophilus, a German monk in the fourth
century, who gave receipts for preparing the colours, and had thereby
convicted Vasari of error. "Raspe is poor, and I shall try and get
subscriptions to enable him to print his work, which is sensible, clear,
and unpretending." Three months later it was, "Poor Raspe is arrested
by his /tailor/. I have sent him a little money, and he hopes to recover
his liberty, but I question whether he will be able to struggle on here."
His "Essay on the Origin of Oil Painting" was actually published
through Walpole's good service in April 1781. He seems to have had
plans of going to America and of excavating antiquities in Egypt,
where he might have done good service, but the bad name that he had
earned dogged him to London. The Royal Society struck him off its
rolls, and in revenge he is said to have threatened to publish a travesty
of their transactions. He was doubtless often hard put to it for a living,
but the variety of his attainments served him in good stead. He
possessed or gained some reputation as a mining expert, and making
his way down into Cornwall, he seems for some years subsequent to

1782 to have been assay-master and storekeeper of some mines at
Dolcoath. While still at Dolcoath, it is very probable that he put
together the little pamphlet which appeared in London at the close of
1785, with the title "Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous
Travels and Campaigns in Russia," and having given his /jeu d'esprit/
to the world, and possibly earned a few guineas by it, it is not likely
that he gave much further thought to the matter. In the course of 1785
or 1786, he entered upon a task of much greater magnitude and
immediate importance, namely, a descriptive catalogue of the
Collection of Pastes and Impressions from Ancient and Modern Gems,
formed by James Tassie, the eminent connoisseur. Tassie engaged
Raspe in 1785 to take charge of his cabinets, and to commence
describing their contents: he can hardly have been ignorant of his
employé's delinquencies in the past, but he probably estimated that
mere casts of gems would not offer sufficient temptation to a man of
Raspe's eclectic tastes to make the experiment a dangerous one. Early
in 1786, Raspe produced a brief but well-executed conspectus of the
arrangement and classification of the collection, and this was followed
in 1791 by "A Descriptive Catalogue," in which over fifteen thousand
casts of ancient and modern engraved gems, cameos, and intaglios from
the most renowned cabinets in Europe were enumerated and described
in French and English. The two quarto volumes are a monument of
patient and highly skilled industry, and they still fetch high prices. The
elaborate introduction prefixed to the work was dated from Edinburgh,
April 16, 1790.
This laborious task completed, Raspe lost no time in applying himself
with renewed energy to mineralogical work. It was announced in the
/Scots Magazine/ for October 1791 that he had discovered in the
extreme north of Scotland, where he had been invited to search for
minerals, copper, lead, iron, manganese, and other valuable products of
a similar character. From Sutherland he brought specimens of the finest
clay, and reported a fine vein of heavy spar and "every symptom of
coal." But in Caithness lay the loadstone which had brought Raspe to
Scotland. This was no other than Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, a
benevolent gentleman of an ingenious and inquiring disposition, who
was anxious to exploit the supposed mineral wealth of his barren
Scottish possessions. With him Raspe took up his abode for a

considerable time at