Faustus was the Cagliostro of the sixteenth century. It is not an easy task to find the few grains of historical truth referring to him, among the chaff of popular fiction that several centuries have accumulated around his name. A halo so mysterious and miraculous surrounds his person, that not only have various other famous individuals, who lived long before or after him, been completely amalgamated with him, but even his real existence has been denied, and not much over a hundred years after his death he was declared by scholars to be a mere myth. A certain J.C. Duerr attempted to prove, in a learned "Dissertatio Epistolica de Johanne Fausto," (printed at Altorf, in 1676,) that the magician of that name had never existed, and that all the strange things which had been related of him referred to the printer John Faust, or Fust,--who had, indeed, been confounded with him before, although he lived nearly a century earlier. And when we think of the superstitious fear and monkish prejudice with which the great invention of printing was at first regarded, such a confusion of two persons of similar name, and both, in the eyes of a dark age, servants of Satan, cannot surprise us. Our John Faustus was also sometimes confounded with two younger contemporaries, one of whom was called Faustus Socinus, and made Poland the chief theatre of his operations; the other, George Sabellicus, expressly named himself Faustus Junior, also Faustus Minor. Both were celebrated necromancers and astrologers, who probably availed themselves of the advantage derived from the adoption of the famous name of Faustus.[1] A second attempt to prove the historical nonentity of Dr. Faustus was made at Wittenberg, in the year 1683. Some of his popular biographers had claimed for him a professorship at that celebrated university, or at least brought him into connection with it,--a pretension which the actual professors of that learned institution thought rather prejudicial to their honor, and which they were desirous of seeing refuted. Stimulated, as it would seem, by a zeal of this kind, J.G. Neumann wrote a "Dissertatio de Fausto Praestigiatore," in which he not only tried to prove that Dr. Faustus had never been at Wittenberg, but pronounced his whole story fabulous. An attempt like this would not surprise us in our own time, the age of historical skepticism; but the seventeenth century gave credit to narratives having much slighter foundation. Although this dissertation was full of historical mistakes and erroneous statements, it made some sensation, as is proved by its four successive editions. It was also translated into German. All Neumann's endeavors, however, could not stand against the testimony of contemporaries, who partly had known Faustus personally, partly had heard of him from living witnesses, and allude to his death as an occurrence of recent date.