enitence saved them, and secured to
them finally a place among the saints of the Church. But for Faustus
there is no compromise; his awful compact is binding; and whatever hope
of his salvation modern poetry has excited for the unfortunate Doctor
is, to say the least, in direct contradiction of the popular legend.

Faustus was the Cagliostro of the sixteenth century. It is not an easy
task to find the few grains of historical truth referring to him, among
the chaff of popular fiction that several centuries have accumulated
around his name. A halo so mysterious and miraculous surrounds his
person, that not only have various other famous individuals, who lived
long before or after him, been completely amalgamated with him, but
even his real existence has been denied, and not much over a hundred
years after his death he was declared by scholars to be a mere myth. A
certain J.C. Duerr attempted to prove, in a learned "Dissertatio
Epistolica de Johanne Fausto," (printed at Altorf, in 1676,) that the
magician of that name had never existed, and that all the strange
things which had been related of him referred to the printer John
Faust, or Fust,--who had, indeed, been confounded with him before,
although he lived nearly a century earlier. And when we think of the
superstitious fear and monkish prejudice with which the great invention
of printing was at first regarded, such a confusion of two persons of
similar name, and both, in the eyes of a dark age, servants of Satan,
cannot surprise us. Our John Faustus was also sometimes confounded with
two younger contemporaries, one of whom was called Faustus Socinus, and
made Poland the chief theatre of his operations; the other, George
Sabellicus, expressly named himself Faustus Junior, also Faustus Minor.
Both were celebrated necromancers and astrologers, who probably availed
themselves of the advantage derived from the adoption of the famous
name of Faustus.[1]

A second attempt to prove the historical nonentity of Dr. Faustus was
made at Wittenberg, in the year 1683. Some of his popular biographers
had claimed for him a professorship at that celebrated university, or
at least brought him into connection with it,--a pretension which the
actual professors of that learned institution thought rather
prejudicial to their honor, and which they were desirous of seeing
refuted. Stimulated, as it would seem, by a zeal of this kind, J.G.
Neumann wrote a "Dissertatio de Fausto Praestigiator