as Zoroaster, Democritus, Empedocles, Apollonius, Virgil, Albertus Magnus, Merlin, and Paracelsus.  In the sixth century Theophilus of Syracuse was said to have sold himself to the devil and to have been saved from damnation only by the miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary, who visited hell and bore away the damnable compact.  So far as his bond was concerned, Theophilus was said to have had eight successors among the Popes of Rome.

Architects of cathedrals and engineers of bridges were wont, if we believe popular tales, to barter their souls in order to realize their great conceptions.  How do such notions get into the minds of the people?  I attempted not an answer but an explanation in a preface to Gounod’s opera published by Schirmer some years ago, which is serving me a good turn now.  For the incomprehensible the Supernatural is the only accounting.  These things are products of man’s myth-making capacity and desire.  With the advancement of knowledge this capacity and desire become atrophied, but spring into life again in the presence of a popular stimulant.  The superstitious peasantry of Bavaria beheld a man in league with the devil in the engineer who ran the first locomotive engine through that country, More recently, I am told, the same people conceived the notion that the Prussian needle-gun, which had wrought destruction among their soldiery a the war of 1866, was an infernal machine for which Bismarck had given the immortal part of himself.

When printing was invented, it was looked upon in a double sense as a black art, and it was long and widely believed that Johann Fust, or Faust, of Mayence, the partner of Gutenberg, was the original Dr. Johann Faustus (the prototype of Goethe’s Faust), who practised magic toward the end of the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, made a compact with Mephistopheles, performed many miraculous feats, and died horribly at the last.  But Fust, or Faust, was a rich and reputable merchant of Mayence who provided capital to promote the art of Gutenberg and Schoffer, and Mr. H. Sutherland Edwards, who gossips pleasantly and at great length about the Faust legends in Volume I of his book, “The Lyrical Drama,” indulges a rather wild fancy when he considers it probable that he was the father of the real mediaeval in carnation of the ancient superstition.  The real Faust had been a poor lad, but money inherited from a rich uncle enabled him to attend lectures at the University of Cracow, where he seems to have devoted himself with particular assiduity to the study of magic, which had at that period a respectable place in the curriculum.  Having obtained his doctorial hat, he travelled through Europe practising necromancy and acquiring a thoroughly bad reputation.  To the fact that this man actually lived, and lived such a life as has been described, we have the testimony of a physician, Philip Begardi; a theologian, Johann Gast, and no less a witness than Philip Melanchthon, the reformer.  Martin Luther refers to Faust in his “Table Talk” as a man lost beyond all hope of redemption; Melanchthon, who says that he talked with him, adds:  “This sorcerer Faust, an abominable beast, a common sewer of many devils (turpissima bestia et cloaca multorum diabolorum), boasted that he had enabled the imperial armies to win their victories in Italy.”