The combination of fact and fiction in the William Morrell narratives had been tried earlier in Settle's first known criminal biography, _The Life and Death of Major Clancie, the Grandest Cheat of this Age_ (1680). Like Bunyan's _Mr. Badman_, advertised in the same issue of _The Term Catalogues_ (I, 382), _Major Clancie_ purports to narrate "Real matter of Fact." Thus, in the background, significant historical events, from the Irish Rebellion to the Great Fire, are being enacted. Important English worthies--Lord Ormonde, Bishop Compton, Charles II--become entangled in the villainies of the Major, an actual Irish criminal. None of this historical backdrop is to be found, however, in _The Notorious Impostor_; and the characters here, although Sir William Walters and Humphrey Wickham were well-known local personages, are not historically eminent. The picaresque in _Major Clancie_, too, is more readily identifiable than in _The Notorious Impostor_. For, contrary to its stated aim, the biography of Clancie is more fiction than fact. Anthony Wood, noting the fictional elaborations, remarked: "Several stories in this book which belong to other persons are fathered on the said major; who, as I remember, was in Oxon in the plague year 1665 when the king and the queen kept their respective courts there."[2] Wood then contributes a few of his own pungent stories about the Major, which have no counterparts in Settle's narrative. Where the two writers provide parallel accounts, the "fiction" appears to be based on a substratum of truth surviving in anecdotes. Settle's verisimilitude had an effect upon Theophilus Lucas's _Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues, and Comical Adventures of the Most Famous Gamesters and Celebrated Sharpers_ (1714), which begins with a condensed version of _The Life and Death of Major Clancie_.[3] Lucas presents his account as if it were a true memoir.