There are some peculiarities in the rhythm of Faust to which it may be as well specially to call the attention of the English reader. While the fundamental metre is the octosyllabic Iambic, there is a liberal use of the decasyllabic line, whenever the dignity of the subject seems to require it, and not seldom, too, I fancy, from a fine instinct which Goethe had to avert what Byron calls "the fatal facility" of the octosyllabic stanza. This facility the German poet counteracts also in another way, by the variety of the places to which he attaches his rhyme; the couplet being constantly varied with the quatrain, and that either in the way of the alternate lines rhyming, or the first with the fourth, and the second with the third. But a still more characteristic feature in the rhythm of Faust is the frequent use of the Alexandrian line of twelve syllables, and that, not as Pope and Dryden use it, for giving greater volume and swell to a closing line, but simply to indulge an easy motion, such as we may imagine a German to delight in, when smoking his pipe and sipping his beer on a mild summer evening, beneath the village lime tree. I request the English reader particularly to note this peculiarity, and generally to tune his ear to the varied flow of Goethe's easy rhythm; otherwise he will be apt to blame the translator, who certainly is not bound to sacrifice one of the most characteristic features of his author to propitiate the favour of the most ignorant, the most uncultivated, and the most lazy section of his readers. In the strictly lyrical parts of the poem it will be found that, if not with curious minuteness, certainly in general tone and effect, I have carefully followed the movement of the original. To have done otherwise, indeed, would have been difficult for me, to whom the movement of the original, in all its changes, has long been as familiar as the responses of the Church Service to a devout Episcopalian. Only let the reader not expect from me any attempt to give back on every occasion the trochaic rhymes or double endings, as we call them, of the original. Such an attempt will only be made by the writer who is more anxious to gain applause by performing a difficult feat, than to ensure grace by conforming to the plain genius of the language in which he writes. J. S. B. /Altnacraig, Oban,/ 1_st October_ 1880. PRELIMINARY. /The/ story of Dr. Faustus and the Devil is one of such deep human significance, and, from the Reformation downwards, of such large European reputation, that in giving some account of its origin, character, treatment, legendary and poetical, I shall seem to be only gratifying a very natural curiosity on the part of the intelligent reader.