Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von, the original of Bürger's wonder-narrating hero, was a German officer about the beginning of the eighteenth century. He entered the Russian army, and served in several campaigns against the Turks. An irresistible propensity towards exaggeration was his ruling passion. Accordingly, on his return to Germany, he was wont to describe, with all the intense earnestness and minute particularizing of a true narrator, the prodigies feats he had done in Turkey. It was at Pyrmont that the poet Bürger happened to be one of his auditors, and to hear some of those extravagant fictions which afterwards formed the groundwork of the humorous Wunderbare Abenteuer und Reisen des Herrn von Münchhausen. The hero of the book was very much enraged and chagrined at the notoriety which soon became attached to his name. He died in 1797.