ven to his admiring
contemporaries. He liked to play with his opponents. His imagination
clothed the form of an enemy with a grotesque mask, and he teased,
scorned, and stabbed this picture of his imagination with turns of
speech which had not always the grace of moderation, or even of
decency; but in the midst of vituperation, his good humor generally
had a conciliatory effect--although, to be sure, not upon his victims.
Petty spite was rarely visible; not seldom the most imperturbable
good-nature. Sometimes he fell into a true artistic zeal, forgot the
dignity of the reformer, and pinched like a German peasant boy, even
like a malicious goblin. What blows he gave to all his opponents, now
with a club, wielded by an angry giant, now with a jester's bauble! He
liked to twist their names into ridiculous forms, and thus they lived
in Wittenberg circles as beasts, or as fools. Eck became Dr. Geck;
Murner was adorned with the head and claws of a cat; Emser, who had
printed at the head of most of his pamphlets his coat-of-arms the head
of a horned goat, was abused as a goat. The Latin name of the renegade
humanist Cochlaeus, was retranslated, and Luther greeted him as a snail
with impenetrable armor, and--sad to say--sometimes also as a dirty
boy whose nose needed wiping. Still worse, terrible even to his
contemporaries, was the reckless violence with which he declaimed
against hostile princes. It is true that he sometimes bestowed upon
his sovereign's cousin, Duke George of Saxony, a consideration hardly
to be avoided. Each considered the other the prey of the devil, but in
secret each esteemed in the other a manly worth. Again and again they
fell into dissension, even in writing, but again and again Luther
prayed warmly for his neighbor's soul. The reckless wilfulness of
Henry VIII. of England, on the other hand, offended the German
reformer to the depths of his soul; he reviled him horribly and
without cessation; and even in his last years he treated the
hot-headed Henry of Brunswick like a naughty school-boy. "Clown" was
the mildest of many dramatic characters in which he represented him.
When, later, such outpourings of excessive zeal stared at him from the
printed page, and his friends complained, he would be vexed at his
rudeness, upbraid himself, and honestly repent. But repentance availed
little, for on the next occasion he would commit the same fault; and
Spalatin had some reason to look distrustfully upon a project