must
have confirmed all the superstitious rumors about him the reader will
easily conceive. But, according to the popular legend, his end was
still more terrible. He seems to have returned to his own country, and
scholars, worthy young men, surround him once more, and become much
attached to him. From this one would suppose him to have been at
Wittenberg, or Ingoldstadt, or any university city, but, instead of
this, we find him in a little Saxon village, called Rimlich. The
twenty-fourth year draws to its close. At last, at the eleventh hour,
Faustus bethinks himself to repent; but it is too late. His end,
related in the simple language of the Volksbuch, is truly awful. He
dismisses his sympathizing friends, bidding them not to be disturbed by
any noises in the night. At midnight a terrible storm arises; it
reaches its height amid thunder and lightning. The friends hear a
fearful shriek. They rise and pray. But when, in the morning, they
enter his room, they are horror-struck at seeing his limbs scattered
round, and the walls, against which the fiend had dashed him to pieces,
covered with his blood. His body was found in the court-yard on a
dung-hill.

The horror of this end made a peculiarly awful impression on the
popular mind. During the Thirty Years' War, it once happened that a
troop of Catholic soldiers broke into a village in Saxony, on the Elbe,
named Breda. They were just about to plunder one of the principal
houses, when the judge of the place, who, it seems, was a shrewd man,
stepped out and told them that this village was the one where Dr.
Faustus was carried off by the Devil, and that in this very house the
blood of the Doctor was still to be seen on the walls. The soldiers
were seized with terror, and left the village.

The story of Faustus's adventurous life and shocking death, with its
impressive lessons, appears at first to have been kept extant only by
oral tradition. Nearly forty years passed before it was written down
and printed. But then, indeed, the book was received with so much
favor, that not only several new and enlarged editions appeared in a
short time, but many similar works were published soon after, which,
though founded on the oldest Volksbuch (of 1588) and Widmann's
"Histories," were yet abundant in new facts and inventions. And that
not to the illiterate classes alone was the subject interesting is
proved by the circumstance that a Latin version of the first Volksbuch
was advertised