It is quite obvious that the connection with Elisa, which for so many years was pleasurable and helpful to Immermann, in the end became burdensome to him. But it is unwarrantable to assert (as Goedeke has done) that it was the breaking off of this connection and his subsequent lawful marriage which first gave Immermann the creative vigour which he displayed in his last important work, _Münchhausen_. It was conceived and executed under Elisa's influence to quite the same extent as his other works. Her personality and the position in which he stood to her often and in many ways influenced his writings. She is supposed to have suggested his drama, _Petrarca_, which treats of Petrarch's love of Laura, and represents the irresistible strength of a passion inspired by a high-born lady even when the said lady is not free. Her views on the subject of love, and its unqualified justification as such, are said to be recognisable in the drama, _Cardenio und Celinde_. She was probably his model for the heroine of the comedy, _Du schelmische Gräfin_, and certainly the model for Johanne in the novel _Die Epigonen_. But all this is as nothing in comparison with the general development and refining influence which she exerted over him as an author. Immermann's is a curious fame. Of all his works only one is still read, his novel, _Münchhausen_; and only one part of this novel, the smaller half of it (now separated from the rest and published by itself), will carry his name down to posterity. This one small volume is in reality of more value than all the rest of his work. In its construction, _Münchhausen_, following the general rule of the Romantic tales, was intentionally disorderly; the book begins, for example, with the eleventh chapter. The hero, a Westphalian baron, is a descendant of the old lying Münchhausen, and, like him, a fantastic liar. The whole was meant to be a sort of satiric repertory of the various humbugs and nonsensicalities of the day, amongst which the author's humour might play at will. But out of all this irregular play of fancy, which corresponds to the title _Eine Geschichte in Arabesken_, there was gradually developed the great rural romance which has taken a place in German literature under the name of _Der Oberhof_. Its principal characters, the village magistrate (_der Hofschulze_) and the fair-haired Lisbeth, represent a new truth, a new creative art. They live and move on "the red soil" of Westphalia, and in their persons the German peasant is for the first time introduced into literature without the sentimentality of the pastoral idyll or the distortion of the opera ballet, undoubtedly conventionalised, but with caste and race individuality. There is a vigorous, fresh naturalness about these characters, which will never grow old.