he most hidden recesses of moral and physical
creation, had seized men of real learning, and seduced them into
mingling absurd astrological and magical fancies with profound and
scholarlike researches. The deepest thinkers of their time, like
Nostradamus, Cardan, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Thomas Campanella,
flattered themselves that they could enter, by means of art and
science, into communion with good or evil spirits, on whose aid they
depended for obtaining knowledge, fame, wealth, and worldly honors and
enjoyments. Faustus was one of those whom a passion for inquiry, in
league with a powerful, sensual nature, led astray. What had been
originally an honest thirst for knowledge, a deep interest in the
supernatural, became gradually a morbid craving after the miraculous,
the pretension of having attained the unattainable, and the attempt to
represent it by means of vulgar jugglery.

Dr. Faustus seems at first to have settled as a practising physician,
and at this period of his life Wagner appears as his _famulus_; for we
never find this _Philister_ among scholars as a companion of the
travelling Faustus, although his connection with him was apparently
lasting. According to the popular legend, the Doctor made him his heir,
and expressly obtained for him Auerhahn, (Heathcock,) a familiar spirit
in the shape of a monkey. This was a sort of caricature of
Mephistopheles, who became, through his ludicrous clumsiness, a
pet-devil of the populace in the puppet-shows, particularly in Holland.
Widmann calls Wagner _Waiger_; while in all other publications
referring to him he bears his right name, Christoph Wagner.

What city it was where Faustus lived before the reputation of
witchcraft made him the subject of so much talk remains unsettled.
Wittenberg and Ingolstadt are alternately named. Some of his
biographers relate, that he led a loose and profligate life, and soon
wasted his cousin's inheritance. Others represent him as a deep,
secluded student, laying hold of one science after another, and
unsatisfied by them all, until he found, by means of his physical and
chemical experiments, the secret path to the supernatural, and, in
order to reap their full fruits, allied himself with the hellish
powers. Faustus himself tells us, in his "Mirakel-, Kunst-, und
Wunder-buch," (or rather, the author of this book makes him tell us,)
how his intercourse with the Devil commenced almost accidentally and
against his intentions:--