made the soft beauties of Tweedside, and the picturesque grandeur of the Perthshire Highlands, inseparably associated with the creations of his poetic fancy. And this brings me to a fourth element in the legend with which Marlow did not require to concern himself particularly, but which, from a great poet of Goethe’s character and with Goethe’s position, could not receive a perfunctory treatment. If the native home of the whole legend is in all its parts essentially German, most especially German is its connection with Wittenberg, and through it with the German University system. Not only the general speculative tendency so characteristic of our trans-Rhenane brethren, but the special academic and scholastic hue of their learning, is vividly portrayed in this national drama. Not more native to the Cumberland meres is Wordsworth, and to the banks of Doon is Robert Burns, than Goethe’s Faust is to Göttingen, Leipzig, and Bonn. A university in Germany is socially a more powerful thing, though architecturally and aristocratically by no means so magnificent a thing as Oxford in England. The German professors are the great representatives and leaders of the national mind in all departments of thought; this is the case only to a certain limited extent in our country. The academical element, therefore, must assert a prominent place in a truly German national poem. And so it is here. The learned Doctor who sells his soul to the Devil was a professor; a man of books certainly, and a trainer of youth; and some of the most suggestive scenes in the poem are those in which the contrast between mere academical learning with the wisdom of deeper thought and the living experience of life is hit off with a few rapid but telling strokes. 

Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum

 I have no desire to preoccupy the judgment of the English reader by any detailed criticism of the merits and defects of Faust as a dramatic poem. As a tale of human interest it will always be largely appreciated, even beyond the circle of strictly poetical readers; and readers of a more specially cultivated taste will not allow any small faults that might readily be pointed out, whether in the structure of the poem or in the treatment of the characters, to interfere with their enjoyment of so rare a combination of profound thought, wise observation, and deep pathos, as this famous production exhibits. I will take the liberty, however, of suggesting to the students of the poem a careful comparison with Lord Byron’s Manfred, and our great dramatist’s Hamlet, as particularly fruitful in valuable conclusions. All Byron’s characters, as the offspring of pride and unchastened ambition, are in a 

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