in the case of Macbeth, with which he was well acquainted, some wild and grotesque atmosphere was necessary for the magic doctor to figure in when he was not occupied directly with his love adventure; so he followed our great dramatist in making the witches' cauldron as necessary to his hero's passion as it was to Macbeth's ambition; and along with this thoroughly mediæval and altogether appropriate adjunct of the witches' kitchen, he contrived to bring in afterwards the wild and weird traditions of a supernatural character which attach to the famous Brocken mountain, the central and topmost elevation of the great ridge of the Harz in Northern Germany; thus rooting his poem locally in the fatherland as firmly as Walter Scott did for us in Scotland when he made the soft beauties of Tweedside, and the picturesque grandeur of the Perthshire Highlands, inseparably associated with the creations of his poetic fancy. And this brings me to a fourth element in the legend with which Marlow did not require to concern himself particularly, but which, from a great poet of Goethe's character and with Goethe's position, could not receive a perfunctory treatment. If the native home of the whole legend is in all its parts essentially German, most especially German is its connection with Wittenberg, and through it with the German University system. Not only the general speculative tendency so characteristic of our trans-Rhenane brethren, but the special academic and scholastic hue of their learning, is vividly portrayed in this national drama. Not more native to the Cumberland meres is Wordsworth, and to the banks of Doon is Robert Burns, than Goethe's _Faust_ is to Göttingen, Leipzig, and Bonn. A university in Germany is socially a more powerful thing, though architecturally and aristocratically by no means so magnificent a thing as Oxford in England. The German professors are the great representatives and leaders of the national mind in all departments of thought; this is the case only to a certain limited extent in our country. The academical element, therefore, must assert a prominent place in a truly German national poem. And so it is here. The learned Doctor who sells his soul to the Devil was a professor; a man of books certainly, and a trainer of youth; and some of the most suggestive scenes in the poem are those in which the contrast between mere academical learning with the wisdom of deeper thought and the living experience of life is hit off with a few rapid but telling strokes.