There were further editions of the Faust book in 1590 and 1592, as well as a rhymed version, which appeared at Tübingen in the winter of 1587-8. It is probably the authors of this book who are referred to in the complaint of the ducal commissioners to the senate of the University of Tübingen, which is recorded in the minutes of the senate on the 15th of April, 1588. The publisher and authors are ordered to be incarcerated for a couple of days, and sternly reprimanded. In the year 1599 there was published at Hamburg a considerably enlarged edition, of which the end of each chapter was adorned with an edifying commentary, called an _Erinnerung_, or Remonstrance, and it is this version which became the basis of the subsequent editions. The story becomes more anti-Catholic than in the earlier editions, and the anti-papal moral is driven home in each _Erinnerung_. The editor, Georg Rudolf Widman, has successfully eliminated any element of titanism or poetry which may have been present in the original book, and Faust becomes merely a young man led astray by the Church of Rome. Widman has even been delicate enough to condense the Helena episode to a mere reference in a footnote. Widman’s version was again subjected to re-arrangement in the year 1674, by the Nuremberg physician Johann Nicolaus Pfitzer, who modified the former polemic against the Catholic Church, and in 1725 Pfitzer’s version was published in abbreviated form by an anonymous editor who called himself a _Christlich-Meynender_, or Man of Christian Sentiments. This volume is exceedingly slim, but it was sold everywhere and became the popular chap-book. It is important in that it contains the germ of the Gretchen episode in Goethe’s drama. Faust tries to seduce a servant-girl, but she is proof against temptation and he offers to marry her; Lucifer, however, dissuades him and gives him Helena instead. [Footnote 5: By Gustav Milchsack in the library at Wolfenbüttel, and edited by him in _Historia D. Johannis Fausti des Zauberers_ [Wolfenbüttel, 1892-7]. Milchsack promised at the time to follow up this publication with a second volume containing the results of his researches, but he has not yet done so, and according to German custom, other scholars have hitherto refrained from trespassing on his preserves, so the problems raised by the discovery of this manuscript have not yet been fully investigated.] [Footnote 6: W. Scherer: _Das älteste Faustbuch_ [Berlin, 1884].] [Footnote 7: Eugen Wolff: _Faust und Luther_ [Halle, 1912].] [Footnote 8: By Wilhelm Meyer, and edited by him in _Nürnberger Faustgeschichten_ [Munich, 1895].] III _Faust in England_ The earliest mention of Faust in England is in a translation by R. H. of a book by Ludwig Lavater, _Of Ghostes and Spirites_, published in 1572:—