leave them for a short time in their hands, to be copied,—­but that the fathers of the city and of the university declined, because they believed this could be done only by sorcery, or with the help of Satan.  Now they sent to him the Guardian of the Convent, Dr. Klinger, in order to convert him and to have masses read for him, for the purpose of delivering him from his hellish connection.  But Faustus opposed, was by the clergy solemnly delivered to the Devil, and, in consequence, banished from the city by the magistrates.

We do not know whether it was for similar juggleries, that, when at Wittenberg, the Elector John the Steadfast ordered him to be arrested, as Manlius relates.  He saved himself by flight.  Melancthon, in one of his letters, mentions having made his acquaintance; the whole tone of the allusion, however, expresses contempt.

The character of the miracles he performed soon ceased to have the literary tincture of the one related above, and they became mere vulgar juggleries and exhibitions of legerdemain, suited to the taste of the multitude.  Scholars turned their backs on him, and we find him only among tipplers and associates of the lowest kind.  At one of their carousals his half-intoxicated companions asked him for a specimen of his witchcraft.  He declared himself willing to gratify them in any request.  They then demanded that he should make a grape-vine full of ripe fruit grow out of the table around which they sat.  Faustus enjoined complete silence, ordered them to take their knives and keep themselves in readiness for cutting the fruit, but not to stir before he gave them leave.  And, behold, before the eyes of the gaping youths, while they themselves were enveloped in a magic mist, there arose a great vine, with as many bunches of grapes as there were persons in the room.  Suddenly the obscuring mist dissolved, and each one saw the others with their hands at their own noses, ready to cut them off, as the promised grapes.  But the vine and the magician had disappeared, and the disenchanted drunkards were left to their own rage.

The reader will be aware that this is the tale of which Goethe availed himself in representing Faustus’s visit to Auerbach’s cellar at Leipzig.  Whether it really occurred there is not stated; but that Faustus was said to have been at Leipzig, and even in Auerbach’s cellar, is an historical fact, attested by two pictures still extant at this famous old tavern, where many of our curious American travellers may have seen them.  These pictures, which have been retouched and renovated more than once,—­last in 1759,—­are marked at the top with the date 1525.  Whether this means the year in which they were painted, or that in which Faustus performed the great feat which the scene represents, remains uncertain.  As it occurred in the beginning of his career, upon which we may assume him to have entered somewhere between 1520 and 1525, the date is quite likely to refer to the time of the feat;