smith of Mayence, who, in the middle of the
fifteenth century, was partner with Gutenberg in the new enterprise of
printing. Robert Browning, in _Fust and his Friends_, tells us, with
great vivacity, the story of the monks who tried to exorcise the magic
spirits from Fust, but forgot their psalm, and so caused an awkward
pause during which Fust retired and brought out a printed copy of the
psalm for each of them. The only connection with magic which this Fust
had, was that so long as this or any other process was kept secret, it
was attributed to supernatural powers.

Faust, although a contemporary of Fust the printer, was a very different
character. Unfortunately, our information about him comes almost
entirely from his enemies, and their accounts are by no means sparing in
abuse. Trithemius, a Benedictine abbot of Spanheim in the early part of
the sixteenth century, writes of him with the most virulent contempt, as
a debauched person and a criminal whose overweening vanity arrogated to
itself the most preposterous supernatural powers. It would appear that
he had been some sort of travelling charlatan, whose performing horse
and dog were taken for evil spirits, like Esmeralda's goat in Victor
Hugo's _Notre Dame_. Even Melanchthon and Luther seem to have shared the
common view of him, and at last there was published at Frankfurt the
_Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus_.
The date of this work is 1587, and a translation of it appeared in
London in 1592. It is a discursive composition, founded upon
reminiscences of some ancient stroller who lived very much by his wits;
but it took such a hold upon the imagination of the time that, by the
latter part of the sixteenth century, Faust had become the necromancer
_par excellence_. Into the Faust-book there drifted endless necromantic
lore from the Middle Ages and earlier times. It seems to have had some
connection with Jewish legends of magicians who invoked the _Satanim_,
or lowest grade of elemental spirits not unlike the "elementals" of
modern popular spiritualism. It was the story of a Christian selling his
soul to the powers of darkness, and it had behind it one of the poems of
Hrosvitha of Gandersheim which relates a similar story of an archdeacon
of Cilicia of the sixth century, and also the popular tradition of Pope
Sylvester the Second, who was suspected of having made the same bargain.
Yet, as Lebahn says, "The Faust-legend in its compl