the two,
he is decidedly the better Christian. The proposition of the compact
comes from Faustus himself, and Mephistopheles only accepts it.
Marlowe's Faustus knows nothing of the feeling of aversion and disgust
with which Goethe's Faust sees himself bound to his hellish companion;
he calls him, repeatedly, "sweet Mephistopheles," and declares,--

"Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I'd give them all for Mephistopheles."

Mr. Hallam, in comparing Marlowe's production with Goethe's,
remarks,--"The fair form of Margaret is wanting." As if this were all
that was wanting! Margaret belonged, indeed, exclusively to Goethe. But
Helena, the favorite ideal of beauty of all old writers, is introduced
in the popular tale, and so, too, in Marlowe. Faustus conjures up her
spirit at the request of the students. Her beauty is described with
glowing colors; "it would," says the old romance, "nearly have enflamed
the students, but that they persuaded themselves she was a spirit,
which made them lightly passe away such fancies." Not so Faustus;
although he is already in the twenty-third year of his compact, he
himself falls in love with the spirit, and keeps her with him until his
end. In all this, Marlowe follows closely; though he has good taste
enough to suppress the figure of the little Justus Faustus, who was the
fruit of this union.

It now only remains to us to consider the way in which modern poets
have apprehended the idea of the Faust-fable. None of the German dramas
and operas which the seventeenth century produced, though they never
failed to draw large audiences, could be compared, in poetical value,
to Marlowe's tragedy. The German stage of that period was of very low
standing, and the few poets who wrote for it, as, for instance,
Lohenstein, preferred foreign subjects,--the more remote in space and
time, the better. The writers of neither the first nor the second
Silesian school were exactly the men to appreciate the depth of a
legend like that of Faustus,--still less the watery poets of the
beginning of the eighteenth century. Lessing, who, with his sharp,
sound criticism, and his clear perception of the beautiful, led the way
to a higher state of things in literature, appears also to have been
the first to discover the deep meaning buried in the popular farces of
Faustus. He pronounced it worthy the genius of a Shakspeare, and
himself attempted to make it the subject of a tragedy. How much it
occupied his m