Neither Raspe nor the baron can be seriously held responsible for a single word of it.

It must have been written by a bookseller's hack, whom it is now quite impossible to identify, but who was evidently of native origin; and the book is a characteristically English product, full of personal and political satire, with just a twang of edification.

The first continuation (chapters one and seven, to twenty, inclusive), which was supplied with the third edition, is merely a modern _rechauffe_, with "up to date" allusions, of Lucian's _Vera Historia_.

Prototypes of the majority of the stories may either be found in Lucian or in the twenty volumes of _Voyages Imaginaires_, published at Paris in 1787.

In case, however, any reader should be sceptical as to the accuracy of this statement he will have no very great difficulty in supposing, as Dr.Johnson supposed of Ossian, that anybody could write a great amount of such stuff if he would only consent to abandon his mind to the task.
With the supplementary chapters commence topical allusions to the recently issued memoirs of Baron de Tott, an enterprising Frenchman who had served the Great Turk against the Russians in the Crimea (an English translation of his book had appeared in 1785).