established himself in a grand Gothic castle, hard by, among the ridges of Taygetus. No sooner is this resolution taken, than the scene suddenly changes from a classical palace a thousand years before Christ, to a Gothic castle a thousand years after Christ, where, in the midst of knights and squires, courtiers, cavaliers, and other appropriate supernumeraries, marshalled plentifully around, the thaumaturgic Doctor appears as a German prince of the Middle Ages, with dignity and loyal regard, coming forward to pay his homage to the paragon of classical beauty. After a few gallant speeches gracefully made and gracefully responded to, Helen, of course, surrenders at discretion; and the scene changes to a lovely Arcadian district, with wood and water, mountain and mead, richly variegating the pastoral solitude, the abode of love. What is there enacted you may guess partly, but not altogether; you may well imagine that Faust and Helen are there depicted as enjoying all the raptures that, to transcendental lovers, in such a place, naturally belong; but you will not guess that from their phantasmal embrace a son is born, and that this son, under the name of Euphorion, is neither more nor less than impersonated Poetry, the same, or a similar allegorial character, that we were already introduced to in the first act, under the name of the Boy-charioteer. Here, in this third act, he appears brisk and nimble, tricksy as a Mercury, lovely as a Cupid, precocious, impetuous, and elastic as a Chatterton. And, like a Chatterton, he will not run and leap only in the fashion of common boys, but he bounds and skips, right and left, above and below, without reason or measure. Light and agile in every motion, more like a bird than a boy, he is tempted to believe that the air, not the earth, is his proper element, and, notwithstanding the importunate warnings of his parents, assays, like Icarus, to bestride the air, and, like Icarus, falls and perishes. This mournful catastrophe the poet gladly makes use of to dissolve the spell of Helen’s phantasmal existence, and to put a finale on the unsubstantial classical courtship of Doctor Faust. The mother precipitates herself after the son, a second time to find her home in the dim halls of Proserpine; and the hero, by the direction of Mephistopheles, seizes the dropped mantle of Helen, and, wrapping himself in it, is straightway enveloped in clouds and borne aloft through far space, even back to honest Deutschland, in quest of new adventures. 

 The fourth act is very short, merely a stepping-stone to the fifth, it would appear. In the first scene Faust is exhibited in a new character. Pleasures both real and fantastical having been exhausted, he now girds his loins to work, and 

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