Innsbruck, and at the desire of the latter calls up before him the shades of Alexander the Great and his wife. Many pranks are also related, which he plays upon the knights attending the Emperor.
The remaining part of the book is principally taken up with an account of the tricks and magical illusions with which Faust diverted himself in Leipzig, Erfurt, Gotha, and other parts of Northern Germany. He here resembles Till Eulenspiegel much more than the ambitious student of Cracow, who “took to himself the wings of an eagle, and would explore all the secrets of heaven and earth.” He swallows a span of horses and a load of hay; he cuts off heads and replaces them; makes flowers bloom at Christmas, draws wine from a table, calls Helen of Troy from the shades at the request of a company of students; and shows himself everywhere as a gay, jovial companion, full of pranks, but exercising his supernatural power quite as often for good as for evil purposes. Finally, in the twenty-third year of his compact, Mephostophiles brings the Grecian Helena to him; he becomes infatuated with her beauty, lives with her, and by her has a son whom he names Justus Faustus. On the night when his term of years expires, we find him in company with some students in a tavern of the village of Rimlich, near Wittenberg. He is overcome with melancholy, and makes the students an address wherein he expresses his great penitence, and his willingness that the Devil should have his body, provided his soul may receive pardon. At midnight a fearful storm arose: the next morning the walls and floor of the room were sprinkled with the bloody fragments of Faust, who had been so torn to pieces that no member was left whole. Helena and her child had disappeared. Wagner, by Faust’s will, became heir to his property, part of which was a dwelling in the town of Wittenberg.
The great popularity of the legend in this form led to the preparation of Widmann’s larger and more ambitious work, which was published at Hamburg, in 1599. Its title is: “The Veritable History of the hideous and abominable sins
