is becoming sated: rarer and rarer
delicacies are needed to satisfy his craving. Repentance!--that is
thrust aside, postponed to a later hour.

One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee,
To glut the longing of my heart's desire--
That I may have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late,
Whose sweet embraces may extinguish clean
Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow.

When at last the hour to fulfil his part of the contract arrives, he
confesses in bitterness of spirit, 'for the vain pleasure of
four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity.'

This man is not one consumed with a thirst of knowledge. Once he asks
Mephistophilis a few questions on astrology; at another time he evinces
some curiosity concerning Lucifer and Hell, idle curiosity because he
regards it all as foolishness. We are _told_ of a journey through the
heavens and of voyages about the world, but we _see_ him exercising
his supernatural gifts in the most puerile and useless fashion.
It is impossible, therefore, to regard his ambition as a lust for
knowledge in the usual meaning of that term, differentiating it from
sensual experience. If Faustus is to be labelled according to his
dominant trait, then let us describe him as the embodiment of
sense-gratification. He is a sensualist from the moment that he takes up
the book of magic and ponders over what it may bring him. A degraded
form of him has been sketched in the Syriac scholar of a modern work of
fiction, who cherished, side by side with a world-wide reputation
for learning, a bestial appetite for profligacy. The message of
_Tamburlaine_ holds as true in the pursuit of pleasure as in that of
conquest. Faustus denies that there is a limit to pleasure, and the
horror of his career grows darker as his mounting desires bear him
further and further on, far beyond the reach of less eager minds, to
the impassable point whence he may only see the heaven beyond. That
point is the hell which once he laughed at as an old wives' tale.

The weakness of _Doctor Faustus_ appears exactly where _Tamburlaine_ is
strongest. In spite of his prodigious boasting and his callous
indifference to suffering, Tamburlaine appeals to us most powerfully as
the right titanic figure for a world-conqueror; his soul is ever above
his body, looking beyond the victory of to-day to the greater conquests
of the future: there is nothing sordid or commonplace abo