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.
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