a pattern, with such ugly figures and flat features, that the
devil owned he had never seen them equalled, except by the
inhabitants of an English town called Norwich, when dressed in
their Sunday's best.[61]

In the original German version of 1791 we have the town of Nuremberg
thus satirised. But Borrow was not the first translator to seize the
opportunity of adapting the reference for personal ends. In the French
translation of 1798, published at Amsterdam, and entitled _Les Aventures
du Docteur Faust_, the translator has substituted Auxerre for
Nuremberg. What makes me think that Borrow used only the French version
in his translation is the fact that in his preface he refers to the
engravings of that version, one of which he reproduced; whereas the
engravings are in the German version as well.

Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (1752-1831), who was responsible for
Borrow's 'first book,' was responsible for much else of an epoch-making
character. It was he who by one of his many plays, _Sturm und Drang_,
gave a name to an important period of German Literature. In 1780 von
Klinger entered the service of Russia, and in 1790 married a natural
daughter of the Empress Catherine. Thus his novel, _Faust's Leben,
Thaten und Hoellenfahrt_, was actually first published at St. Petersburg
in 1791. This was seventeen years before Goethe published his first part
of _Faust_, a book which by its exquisite poetry was to extinguish for
all self-respecting Germans Klinger's turgid prose. Borrow, like the
translator of Rousseau's _Confessions_ and of many another classic,
takes refuge more than once in the asterisk. Klinger's _Faustus_, with
much that was bad and even bestial, has merits. The devil throughout
shows his victim a succession of examples of 'man's inhumanity to man.'
Borrow's translation of Klinger's novel was reprinted in 1864 without
any acknowledgment of the name of the translator, and only a few stray
words being altered.[62] Borrow nowhere mentions Klinger's name in his
latter volume, of which the title-page runs:

Faustus: His Life, Death, and Descent into Hell. Translated
from the German. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1825.

I doubt very much if he really knew who was the author, as the book in
both the German editions I have seen as well as in the French version
bears no author's name on its title-page. A letter of Borrow's in the
possession of an American collector indicates tha