Popular imagination seems to have been inexhaustible in stories of this kind.  But, after the twenty-four years of vile enjoyments, the hour of retribution came at last.  According to our scanty historical notices, Faustus died an unnatural death:  he was found dead in his bed, at his birthplace, Kundlingen, with his neck twisted.  How such a death must have confirmed all the superstitious rumors about him the reader will easily conceive.  But, according to the popular legend, his end was still more terrible.  He seems to have returned to his own country, and scholars, worthy young men, surround him once more, and become much attached to him.  From this one would suppose him to have been at Wittenberg, or Ingoldstadt, or any university city, but, instead of this, we find him in a little Saxon village, called Rimlich.  The twenty-fourth year draws to its close.  At last, at the eleventh hour, Faustus bethinks himself to repent; but it is too late.  His end, related in the simple language of the Volksbuch, is truly awful.  He dismisses his sympathizing friends, bidding them not to be disturbed by any noises in the night.  At midnight a terrible storm arises; it reaches its height amid thunder and lightning.  The friends hear a fearful shriek.  They rise and pray.  But when, in the morning, they enter his room, they are horror-struck at seeing his limbs scattered round, and the walls, against which the fiend had dashed him to pieces, covered with his blood.  His body was found in the court-yard on a dung-hill.

The horror of this end made a peculiarly awful impression on the popular mind.  During the Thirty Years’ War, it once happened that a troop of Catholic soldiers broke into a village in Saxony, on the Elbe, named Breda.  They were just about to plunder one of the principal houses, when the judge of the place, who, it seems, was a shrewd man, stepped out and told them that this village was the one where Dr. Faustus was carried off by the Devil, and that in this very house the blood of the Doctor was still to be seen on the walls.  The soldiers were seized with terror, and left the village.

The story of Faustus’s adventurous life and shocking death, with its impressive lessons, appears at first to have been kept extant only by oral tradition.  Nearly forty years passed before it was written down and printed.  But then, indeed, the book was received with so much favor, that not only several new and enlarged editions appeared in a short time, but many similar works were published soon after, which, though founded on the oldest Volksbuch (of 1588) and Widmann’s “Histories,” were yet abundant in new facts and inventions.  And that not to the illiterate classes alone was the subject interesting is proved by the circumstance that a Latin version of the first Volksbuch was advertised, and (probably) appeared.  On the title-pages of all these books it is expressly stated that they were written as a warning to, and for the edification of, Christian readers.  In 1712, a book was published at Berlin, under the title, “Zauberkuenste und Leben Dr. Fausti,” (The Magic Arts and Life of Dr. Faust,) as the author of which Christoph Wagner was named.  Wagner himself became the subject of a biographical work.