of both languages, and the necessities of rhyme, perImitted him to do.

Those who can read the original will never be satisfied with any translation, either prose or rhyme, and for such no version or interpretation is written. It is from curiosity alone that they will read one, if they read it at all. Those who have access to the fountain and can drink the stream in its freshness, are to be blamed if they rest contented with its waters when turned into a lower channel. But to the thousands who cannot afford the outlay of time and toil necessary to master a foreign language, a translation is the only medium through which they can become acquainted with the original; and it is to these that the present attempt is offered. If they derive from it any knowledge of the author, however slight, the translator will feel amply rewarded for the labour he has bestowed on it.

Some reference to the original story on which the drama is founded appears to be necessary, though it is not intended that the preface should become a commentary.

The Faust of poetry has grown out of the Faust of tradition, and though the creative power of poetry has produced a grander and more powerful being than the old scholar, yet the main elements of the character are the same in both; and, judged even by the imperfect records of his history, the original Faust must have been a remarkable man. Some confusion has been induced by there having been two of the

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name. The earliest in point of time was a John Fust, one of the first discoverers or practisers of the art of printing, the superiority of whose Bibles was, by the monkish copyists, ascribed to the assistance of the devil, which the good sense of pious churchmen ought to have seen would have been a very inconsistent proceeding. Be this as it may, it appears certain that his skill brought him neither profit nor peace, but that he drank the bitter cup so often both before and since given by the world to its benefactors. He is supposed to have died of the plague in 1466. He must not be confounded with the Faust," the Doctor, who appeared on the stage of life at a period some years later, and flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century. The evidence of their having been distinct and separate persons appears conclusive, as Melancthon, Tritheim, and other men of note of the period, are said to have known the Doctor personally. A writer in a late number of Fraser's Magazine, however, contends, in a rather facetious style, for the possibility of their identity; the printer after a period of obscurity reappearing as the Doctor,-nothing of any certainty being known as to the length of the term procured by his pact with the Evil One; but the weight of evidence is against any such conclusion.

JOHANN FAUST, who has become the principal character in a crowd of dramas and poems, was born at Knittlingen, in Suabia, "of parents base of stock," as Marlowe has it, his father being a peasant.

He

was sent to study at Wittenberg, and afterwards removed to Ingoldstadt, where he pursued the study of medicine, and eventually became a physician. A considerable inheritance fell to him from an uncle, which he spent, in what manner is not stated. Growing discontented with the insufficiency of human knowledge, he is said to have taken to the study and practice of magic, and to have acquired supernatural powers, and an unlimited possession of earthly enjoyments, by a compact entered into with the devil for four-and-twenty years. He wandered through Europe in the character of a travelling scholar, performing strange feats and acquiring great celebrity; he was attended by a familiar demon, (the MEPHISTOPHELES of this and all the dramas on the subject,) and conveyed himself from place to place on a magic mantle. Of the time, place and circumstances of his death, little, if anything, is known with certainty; tradition fixes it as having occurred in 1560, at a village called Rimlich, where he was duly seized and carried away by the fiend as per contract. Another account mentions Breda, a village in Saxony, on the river Elbe, as the scene of this catastrophe; the bloodsprinkled walls of the apartment in which it occurred, being, like the bricks in the chimney cited by Jack Cade's comrade, “alive to this day," to testify to the fact.

The truth of all this seems to be, that his moral character suffered for his intellectual attainments, and that he paid the usual penalty for superiority in an

age of ignorance, by being traduced as a sorcerer. He was probably skilled in natural philosophy and chemistry, and was, in various kinds of knowledge, far in advance of his era; the necessary consequence followed; all that his contemporaries could not account for by their own limited experience they ascribed to magic and unholy arts. It must have been a great advantage to ignorance to have such a weapon at its command; an aspiration for the truth, and a too active desire for knowledge, could not be more effectually checked than by stigmatising the results of that activity as unholy and accursed. There are men,

even now, who do not want the disposition to suppress inquiry by the same means.

Amid all the dreams, vagaries, and absurdities of the tale, enough appears mingled with the dross of tradition to justify the characteristics of the creation of poetry. Enough is known to us to prove that the real Faust was a man ambitious of all knowledge, and untiring in his pursuit of it; that he exhausted the learning of his time, and finding, like the Jewish sage, that "in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow," fell into a discontent and bitterness of soul. The "much grief" of the sage proceeded from the feeling that he could not make his "much knowledge "more; from a consciousness that however far he reached there was still infinity before him. There is a weariness too in heaping up knowledge, sooner felt than the vanity of heaping up riches, knowing not "who shall gather

them." The human mind gets tired of amassing knowledge that calls into exertion only one class of its faculties. It loses not its desires for more, but its longing is for knowledge of a different kind than it has hitherto acquired; it wishes to penetrate mysteries, and enter into spheres of action wisely forbidden to the human intelligence, till it has "put on immortality." It is the deep and universally-felt wish to enter into a communion with the spirit-world, that has caused the belief in the possibility of such an intercourse; and though the forms this belief has taken are strange and absurd, sometimes filthy and revolting, its foundation is in an intelligible principle. It speaks of a tendency beyond our present state, and a knowledge of the "great gulf" fixed between it and what is beyond us; the dreams of magic with all their sublimities and absurdities, are but the fantastic means that man has fashioned to himself, in the vain hope of passing the abyss without going through "the valley of the shadow of Death."

It is in this struggle between the ambition of our intellect and its narrowed capacity, that poetry has found one of its noblest themes. It has been mingled with other emotions, and wrought by genius into a poem that will possess its interest for ever, for it is the expression of a problem and a mystery, that man will never be able to solve or explain. FAUST has become the embodiment of this great conflict of our being; in him, perhaps, as its type and impersonation, working to excess, but existing in some degree