and herewith, and with a conjuration of soft dews and mists convocated by Plutus to lay the flaming devils whom he had raised, ends the spectacle and the scene. 

 What next? The fourth scene discovers the Emperor on his holy Roman throne, as in the second. Faust hopes that his Majesty has readily pardoned the frolic of flame-jugglery with which the preceding day’s sport had ended; and the Emperor expresses his high delight with the exhibition of such tricks; for nothing could give him greater pleasure than to imagine himself for a season a king of salamanders. Mephistopheles then comes forward with the finished draught of his new scheme for the replenishing of the Imperial exchequer; and, that his Majesty may not have long to wait for the drudgery of the mattock and spade in bringing to light the hidden treasures before promised, the affair is to be managed in the meantime by paper money; and straightway, upon the faith of the to-be-unearthed gold, the Minister of Finance is relieved from his perplexities, and the whole country rises and swells and billows up in a flux of prosperity. This as a prelude; but the serious work is yet to come. The Emperor requests the great conjuror to produce for his amusement something better than salamanders, and more wonderful even than paper money. He wishes to see the famous beauty, the Spartan Helen who set Troy on fire, and Paris the princely shepherd, whose well-trimmed locks and gold-embroidered mantle had prevailed to seduce her from her fidelity to her royal husband. Faust engages to gratify the Imperial wishes; and Mephistopheles, after a little demurring—the shades of the classical world being not within his proper domain—consents. Whereupon the hero, holding in his hand a magic key which he has received from his comrade, descends through the earth into the empty and bodiless realm of the Mothers; and, having abstracted from their presence a mystical tripod, ascends into the upper air, and appears before the Imperial Court, where, habited as a priest, he instantly invokes the shade of the famous pair, to whom Aphrodite has been so lavish of her gifts. They forthwith appear, and, environed by music and mist, exhibit their classical charms, and repeat their storied loves to the modern eye. The exhibition, of course, after the first surprise is over, produces different effects on the spectators, according to their different tastes; the Court critics, like other brethren of the same carping fraternity, must have something to object, even to the queen of beauties; but Faust is fascinated, and, at the first glance, falls violently in love with the phantom which himself had raised. As before the vanishing form which he had seen in the magic mirror, when in the 

 Prev. P 25/412 next