Mirandula.[i6] Reuchlin was a German, and is the more interesting to us as the contemporary, or rather the master and instructor of Agrippa, Melancthon, and many celebrated men of the sixteenth century, whose names stand immediately connected with the story of Doctor Faust. To complete the wild dreamings of the Italian Platonists, nothing was now wanting but a revival of the Rabbinical and Talmudistic lore; and Reuchlin, whom Europe still reveres as the father of Hebrew learning in modern Theology, was precisely the man for this purpose. It was natural that the language of the sacred Book should have been considered as containing something mystical and transcendental even in its very letters; and we need not wonder that the enthusiasm of the first Hebrew scholars in Germany should have discovered the key of all the sciences in that cabbalistic lore, which we are now accustomed to use in common discourse, as a synonym for the most childish and unintelligible jargon. 

 Taking, thus, the prevailing theology of the Church, in connection with the impulse which the human mind had received from the revival of the Platonic philosophy, and the strong reaction, which the risings of independent thought in the breasts of men like Telesius, Campanella, and Bruno, had raised against the long-established despotism of the Aristotelian philosophy,—and all this worked up to a point by the revival of Cabbalism, through Reuchlin and other cultivators of Oriental literature,—we shall have no difficulty in perceiving at once the leading features of the age in which Faust flourished, and the causes which led to their development. We see the human intellect, in being roused into new life from the icy night of scholasticism, surrounded by the glowing but unsubstantial morning-clouds of a philosophy of feeling and imagination. Sufficiently occupied with gazing, child-like, on the hovering shapes that teemed so richly from its new-awakened being, it had no time, no wish, to enter upon the severe task of conscious manhood, that of criticising its own powers, and defining, with cautious precision, what the mind of man can know, and what it cannot know,—and was thus destined, for a short season, to flounder through the misty regions of theosophy and magic, till it should learn, from experience, to find at once its starting-point and its goal, in the exhaustless fulness of actual Nature. 

 In such an age, and under the influence of opinions, religious and philosophical, so different from those now prevalent, flourished the mysterious hero of modern magic, whom the pen of Goethe has made, likewise, one of the principal heroes of modern poetry. That a good deal of obscurity 

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