uthful Historia and Magic of Dr. Faust, from
which every Christian man should take warning, and specially those who
are of a presumptuous, proud, curious and obstinate mind and head, that
they may flee from all Magic, Incantation, and other works of the devil.
Amen! This I wish for each and every one from the ground of my heart.
Amen! Amen!'

The great popularity of this original Faust-book led to the publication
of many other versions of the story. In the very next year a Faust-book
in rime appeared. In some of these versions Mephisto has a very bad time
of it, Faust setting him all kinds of impossible tasks--such as writing
the name of Christ or painting a crucifix, or taking him on Good Friday
to Jerusalem--until the demon begs for his release, offering to give
back the written compact. In Strassburg at a shooting competition
Faust's magic bullet strikes Mephisto, who 'yells out again and again'
in pain. In a Dutch version, where the demon has the name 'Jost,' Faust
amuses himself by throwing a bushel of corn into a thorn hedge late at
night, when poor 'Jost' is tired to death, and bids him pick up every
grain in the same way as in the old story Venus vents her malice on
Psyche. The most important German version was that by Widmann--an
amplification of the old Faust-book. There also appeared a life of
Faust's Famulus (assistant), Christopher Wagner, whom the devil attends
in the form of an ape. Of one of these versions (I think Widmann's)
there appeared about 1590 an English translation, which was
supplemented by various English ballads on the same subject, and it was
an Englishman--Shakespeare's great contemporary, the poet Christopher
Marlowe--who was himself, as you know, a man of Faust-like temperament,
and not unlike him in his fate--being killed in a drunken brawl--who
first _dramatized_ the story. His brilliant and lurid play, 'The
Tragical History of Dr. Faustus' follows very closely most of the
details given in the German Faust-books. Its poetical beauties (and they
are many) are unfortunately, as Hallam rightly remarks, intermingled
with a great deal of coarse buffoonery. Possibly he had to consult the
taste of his public in introducing such a large ingredient of this
buffoon element--taken from what I called the Muenchhausen portion of the
old legend. Patriotic German commentators sometimes deny that Goethe
knew Marlowe's play (though he knew Shakespeare well), but I think there
is no doubt that the openin