his nature, once great and magnificent, has become small, virulent, and
shrunken. He, the scheming, enthusiastic Archangel, has been soured and
civilised into the clever, cold-hearted Mephistopheles."

Marlowe's devil is of the solemn earlier kind, not yet degraded into the
worldling whom Goethe has immortalised. Marlowe's Mephistophilis is
essentially the idealist, and it is his Faust who is determined for the
world. One feels about Mephistophilis that he is a kind of religious
character, although under a cloud. The things he does are done to organ
music, and he might be a figure in some stained-glass window of old. Not
only is he "a melancholy devil, with a soul above the customary hell,"
but he actually retains a kind of despairing idealism which somehow
ranks him on the side rather of good than of evil. The puppet play
curiously emphasises this. "Tell me," says Faust, "what would you do if
you could attain to everlasting salvation?" "Hear and despair! Were I to
attain to everlasting salvation, I would mount to heaven on a ladder,
though every rung were a razor edge." The words are exactly in the
spirit of the earlier play. So sad is the devil, so oppressed with a
sense of the horror of it all, that, as we read, it almost seems as if
Faust were tempting the unwilling Mephistophilis to ruin him.

"Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it;
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!"

To which Faust replies--