Page:The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1895).djvu/32

 first imitator in England, Vincenzo Lunardi, had made a successful ascent from Moorfields as recently as 1784, while in the following year Blanchard crossed the channel in a balloon and earned the sobriquet Don Quixote de la Manche. His grotesque appropriation of the motto "Sic itur ad astra" made him, at least, a fit object for Munchausen's gibes. In the Baron's visit to Gibraltar we have evidence that the anonymous writer, in common with the rest of the reading public, had been studying John Drinkwater's "History of the Siege of Gibraltar" (completed in 1783), which had with extreme rapidity established its reputation as a military classic. Similarly, in the Polar adventures, the "Voyage towards the North Pole," 1774, of Constantine John Phipps, afterwards Lord Mulgrave, is gently ridiculed, and so also some incidents from Patrick Brydone's "Tour through Sicily and Malta" (1773), are, for no obvious reason, contemptuously dragged in. The exploitation of absurd and libellous chapbook lives of ., the famous Ganganelli, can only be described as a low bid for vulgar applause. A French translation of Baron 's celebrated Memoirs appeared at Metz in 1787, and it would certainly seem that in overlooking them the compiler