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THE SATANIC IN LITERATURE.
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vanity of pleasure, knowledge, and power, when he had become their bondman. "A genuine and generous attachment might have placed happiness by means of the affections once more within reach of the oriental monarch. But the presence of three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines deprived him of even that contingency." Mephistopheles, the caustic and cynical voluptuary, could have wished for no better subject, "If an overgrown library can produce a surfeit of knowledge, an overstocked seraglio will more certainly bring an atrophy of the affections. When reason, feeling, and conscience are ill at ease, to fall back upon sensual indulgence for a remedy is to take a roll in the gutter by way of a medicated mud-bath!"

To this recreation the sated scholar, Faust, is invited by Mephistopheles, and in the course of their companionship, the character of Mephistopheles, as "the best and only genuine devil of modern times," is revealed. It is this character we now propose to discuss.

Mephistopheles is not the devil of horn and hoof; for he expressly repudiates the use of such signs of his calling. He says of these appendages, that they would prejudice him in society; shrewdly implying that he could get into many a man's graces in a fashionable doublet who would cut his acquaintance if he swished a tail! Carlyle has said, "Goethe's devil is a cultivated personage, acquainted with modern sciences; he sneers at witchcraft and the black art while employing them." He has the manners of your modern gentleman; can swagger and debate, drink and poetize, swear and pray, smoke and philosophize. He is a diplomatist, and can lie with "distinguished consideration." He is a politician, and can talk and trim in a bar-room with as easy a tact as in the study of the scholar. He is a sneering, scoffing devil, sharp at sarcasm, quick to the ridiculous, appreciative of the rascally, loves a lie as an Englishman does beef, or a Spaniard a bull-fight; and has altogether the coolest inventive malignity, mingled with the most infernal meanness ever embodied in literature. He is perfectly at home in a pew, can say most gracefully his grace, and dusts his knees after devotion with great demureness. He believes in himself, and is true to no one else but himself, which makes him consistently false to all.

His first appearance when he asks the Lord, with great self-com-