classical lore, some dexterity in performing sleight-of-hand wonders, and a panoply of assurance, a clever man like Faust or Paracelsus may easily obtain a livelihood, and, what is more, an imperishable name. For such characters a strolling life is at once a pleasure and a necessity. Paracelsus soon lost his chair at Basle,--for a man is never a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_,--and, if we may believe the common legend, Faust scarcely left a corner of the earth unvisited, and filled Asia and Europe with his renown. And verily he has had his reward. Since the time of his death, not only Germany, but England, France, and Holland, have swarmed with "prodigious and lamentable histories" of the "great magician John Faust, with his testament and his terrible death." Magical books under his name have become as famous as those of Solomon;[*i20] artists and poets have vied with one another in rendering his name immortal in the annals of Art; tragedies and comedies, puppet-plays and operas, ballads and novels, essays, and dissertations and commentaries, prologues and epilogues, and all the varied paraphernalia of genius and erudition, have been heaped on one another, to adorn the trophy of Doctor John Faustus, the great German quack. The wondrous exploits of Faust are endless, and it would be an endless task to recount the tithe of them. Were I to enter upon an exposition of how Doctor Faust first cited Mephistopheles on a crossroad in the midst of a dark fearful wood near Wittenberg,--how the Devil visited him frequently in his own study in all shapes and sizes,--how the Doctor was, after some hesitation, prevailed on to sell his soul to Lucifer, and to that effect signed a formal bond with blood drawn from his own arm,--how he neglected all the warnings of his good genius, and even the terrible writing that appeared on his wounded arm, /Homo Fuge/!--how the wily Devil dissuaded him from the quiet of a domestic life, when he wished to marry, that he might drag him into all kinds of licentiousness,--how he forced Mephistopheles to answer all his importunate interrogatories, as to the state of Hell, and the condition of the damned, which the Devil painted in colours as terrible as if he had been an Evangelist of the north-west Highland type,--how Faust was transported into Hell upon the back of Beelzebub, and left floundering through the chaos of the abyss,--how he travelled from star to star, and surveyed all the infinity of worlds, with as much expedition as the imagination of a modern poet,--how he turned astrologer, and vied with the fame of Nostradamus,--how he wandered over the whole world, and saw Rome, which is a city where there is a river called Tiber, and Naples, which is the birthplace of Virgil, who was also a great magician, and caused a passage to be made through the rock of Posilippo, in one night, a whole mile long,--how he played the devil in the Sultan's seraglio, and passed himself off for Mahomet with the