The popularity of the legend of Faustus, although of German origin, was, almost from its first rise, not confined to German lands.  The French, Dutch, and English versions of the poor Doctor’s adventurous life are but very little younger than his German biographies; and it was about the same time that he was made the subject of a tragedy by Marlowe, one of the most gifted of Shakspeare’s dramatic predecessors.  We are not afraid of erring, when we ascribe the uncommon popularity and rapid circulation of this legend principally to its deep and intrinsic moral interest.  Faustus’s time of action was exactly the period of the great religious reformation which shook all Europe.  During the sixteenth century, even the untaught and illiterate classes learned to watch more closely over the salvation of their souls than when they felt themselves safe beneath the guardianship of the Holy Mother Church.  And to those who remained under the guidance of the latter, the dangers of learning and independent thinking, and of meddling with forbidden subjects, were pointed out by the monks with two-fold zeal.  It cannot, therefore, surprise us, that the life and death of a famous contemporary, who for worldly goods and worldly wisdom placed his soul at stake, excited a deep and general interest.  In one feature, indeed, his history bears decidedly the stamp of the great moral revolution of the time:  we mean its awful end.  There are two legends of the Middle Ages—­and perhaps many more—­in which the fundamental ideas are the same.  The two Saints, Cyprianus, (the “Magico Prodigioso” of Calderon,) and Bishop Theophilus, (the hero of Conrad of Wuerzburg,) were both tempted by the Devil with worldly goods and worldly prosperity, and allured into the pool of sin perhaps deeper than Faustus; but repentance and penitence saved them, and secured to them finally a place among the saints of the Church.  But for Faustus there is no compromise; his awful compact is binding; and whatever hope of his salvation modern poetry has excited for the unfortunate Doctor is, to say the least, in direct contradiction of the popular legend.

Faustus was the Cagliostro of the sixteenth century.  It is not an easy task to find the few grains of historical truth referring to him, among the chaff of popular fiction that several centuries have accumulated around his name.  A halo so mysterious and miraculous surrounds his person, that not only have various other famous individuals, who lived long before or after him, been completely amalgamated with him, but even his real existence has been denied, and not much over a hundred years after his death he was declared by scholars to be a mere myth.  A certain J.C.  Duerr attempted to prove, in a learned “Dissertatio Epistolica de Johanne Fausto,” (printed at Altorf, in 1676,) that the magician of that name had never existed, and that all the strange things which had been related of him referred to the printer John Faust, or Fust,—­who had, indeed, been confounded