Page:Luther's correspondence and other contemporary letters 1507-1521.djvu/383

 dregs of learning do not easily learn better, but prefer to be pigs with Gryllus,^ especially in this papal state, where the Pope's purse is an oracle and where it is impious to deviate a hair's breadth from the constitutions of the canonists. There are some Italians who, having published volumes from these shades, croak to the field and swamp, but they are men of mediocrity whose lucubrations are colder than the water of Monacris.^ But truth herself, having laid aside her mask, now shows her face in spite of them. However, the good man was not a little injured by a libel of a poor impostor, who, by pretending that Martin had recanted, brought back even those who had entered the way of truth to their former errors." So great is the desire of these rascals to deceive, that, when they see themselves otherwise vanquished, they think up some new way to crush truth for their own gain, traducing the fame and doctrine of excellent Martin as heretical. . ..

317. JOHN KOTTER TO BONIFACE AMERBACH IN AVIGNON.

Burckhardt-Biedermann, 141.

(Freiburg im Uchtland, October 22, 152a)

Kotter, of Strassburg, was an organist and composer at Freiburg until 1530, when he was banished. He then found an asylum in Bern, and taught music until his death 1541. Cf. O. Qemen ; Beitrage sur Reformationsgeschichte, iii. 2off.

. . . Doctor Martin Luther has published a book To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improve- ment of the Christian Estate, which was printed at Basle* October 13,* and was sent me by the agent. I have never read nor heard the like; all men wonder at it; some think th^ devil speaks out of him, some the Holy Ghost. He shake^ the ground in a way that the Holy Father and the Roman^* won't find to their taste. At the end of his book I find th^^

^ ypvXhx:, "Porker." Cf. Plutarch, Moralia, pp. 985-6-

'An Arcadian spring, proverbially cold. Pliny, Hist, not., xxxi. ay.

"Luther himself mentions this work in the beginning of his Babylonian Captwity (November, 1520): "Scripsit quidam frater Cremonensis Italus 'rcTOcataonem Martini Lutheri ad sanctam sedem,' hoc est, qua non ego, ut verba tonant, aed qua ipse me revocat: sic enim I tali hodie incipiunt latinisare." Cf. Weimar, vi. 486. Cf. supra, no. 199. Luther spoke of it in August. Enden, U. 456.

«"Sambstag vor galli." It came out first at Wittenberg In August.

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