rice to Rome. When the new
zeal for the restoration of the Church brought good and bad alike
before the tribunal of the inquisition in Italy, the emigration of
those whose lives were insecure must have been very numerous. It is
probably from the life of one of these charlatans that the adventures
of Faust have been gathered and formed into the old popular tale. After
Luther's death, it is evident that they penetrated into the courts of
the German princes. It was an adventurer of this kind, "Jerome Scotus,"
who, in 1593, at Coburg, estranged the unhappy Duchess Anna of Saxe
Coburg from her husband, and brought her into his own power by
villainous means. Vain were the endeavours of the Duke to obtain the
extradition of Scotus from Hamburg, where he lived long in princely
luxury. Five-and-thirty years before, the father of the Duke Johann
Friedrich, the Middle-sized, was long deluded by an impudent impostor,
who gave herself out to be Anne of Cleves (the wife who had been
selected for Henry VIII. of England), and promised him a great treasure
of gold and jewels if he chose to protect her. Another piece of
credulity bore bitter fruits to the same prince, for the influence
which Wilhelm of Grumbach, the haggard old wolf from the herd of the
wild Albrecht of Brandenburg, gained over the Duke, rested on his
foolish prophecies concerning the Electoral dignity and prodigious
treasures. A poor weak-minded boy who was maintained by Grumbach, had
intercourse with angels who dwelt in the air-hole of a cellar, and
declared themselves ready to produce gold, and bring to light a mine
for the Duke. It may be perceived from judicial records, that the
little angels of the peasant child had a similarity, unfavourable to
their credibility, to our little old dwarfs.

There was at Berlin, about the time of Scotus, one Leonhard Turneysser,
a charlatan, more citizen-like in his occupation, who worked as gold
maker and prepared horoscopes; he escaped by flight the dismal fate,
which almost always overtook his fellows of the same vocation who did
not change their locality soon enough. The Emperor Rudolph also became
a great adept, and amalgamated in the gold crucible both his political
honour and his own Imperial throne. The princes of the seventeenth
century at least show the intense interest of dilettanti. During the
war the art of making gold became very desirable. At that period,
therefore, the adepts thronged to the armies; the more needy th