"Mighty pupil of a mightier man, if thy spirit and thy heart could entirely catch his greatness, thou wouldst still be merely reflecting the rays of his glory. But seat thyself, and let me take thy shadow." Faustus, more and more enraged to see how infinitely the monk rated him below the Devil, now burst forth: "Shadows! yes, indeed, shadows only hast thou seen. How darest thou thus judge and measure the human race? Hast thou seen men? Where, and how? Thou hast merely seen their shadows, which thou adornest with the tinsel of thy crazed imagination, and givest them out as the true forms. Tell me what kind of human beings thou hast seen. Were they not sectaries, fanatics, visionaries, the very offscourings of human nature? Were they not vain devotees, young wives who have cold husbands, and widows who have sleepless nights? Were they not authors eager to have every mark and pimple on their insignificant features turned into a sign and prognostication of genius? Were they not grandees, whose brilliant stations rendered their physiognomies imposing to thine eye? Thou seest that I know thy customers, and have read thy book." _Devil_. Bravo, Faustus! Let me now put in a word, and tell his reverence a few mortifying truths. Brother monk, thou hast formed in thy solitary cell a phantom of perfection, and wouldst fain thrust that into people's heads, which, when there, poisons the brain, as the gangrene corrupts all the flesh around it. There were men long ago who ventured to judge of the innermost of their fellow-creatures from the outside; but there was some difference between them and thee. They had travelled over a considerable part of the earth; experience had made them gray; they had lived and conversed with men, visited all the lurking holes of vice and iniquity, roved from the palace to the cot, crept into the caves of savages, and thus knew what belonged to a well-organised man, and what he could do with his faculties. But shalt thou--swollen with prejudices, pent up in a convent like a toad in the trunk of an oak--pretend to have a clear idea of that which even they barely understood? The monk stood between the two speakers as between two volcanoes in eruption; he crossed his hands humbly upon his breast, and cried, "Have mercy!" The Devil continued: "Among the many impudent follies which I observed in thy book was an attempt to draw the Devil's portrait. It is now high time for him to appear to thee, in order that thou mayst correct the likeness. Look at me; and for once thou shalt be able to say thou hast seen an object in its proper form." The Devil then appeared to him in the most frightful of infernal figures; but he rolled a thick mist before the eyes of Faustus, in order that he might not blast his sight. The monk fell to the earth; and the Devil, resuming all his former comeliness, exclaimed: