For the purpose of discrediting Luther an old opponent wrote: “The part that eating and drinking play in the life of the Reformer is evident from his letters to his Katey,” and then went on to refer to the perfectly innocent passage where Luther says, that he preferred the beer and wine he was used to at home to what he was having at Dessau, whence he wrote. The rest of the letter has also been taken in an unnecessarily tragic sense: “Yesterday I had some poor stuff to drink so that I had to begin singing: ‘If I can’t drink deep then I am sad, for a good deep drink ever makes me so glad.’” It is quite unnecessary to take this as a song sung by a “tipsy man”; it is simply a jesting reference to a popular ditty which quite possibly he had actually struck up to get rid of his annoyance at the quality of the liquor. “You would do well,” he continues in the same jocular vein, “to send me over the whole cellar full of my usual wine, and a bottle of your beer as often as you can, else I shall not turn up any more for the new brew.”[972] No one who is familiar with his homely mode of speech will take offence at his calling himself on one occasion the “corpulent Doctor,” and in any case this involves neither gluttony nor drunkenness. Moreover, the words occur in a serious connection, for we shall hear it from him during the last days of his life: “When I return again to Wittenberg I shall lay myself in my coffin and give the worms a corpulent doctor to feast on,”[973] referring, of course, to his natural stoutness. Offence has also been taken at a sentence met with in Luther’s Table-Talk, where he says of his contemporaries of fifty years before: “How thin they [i.e. their ranks] have become”; from which it was inferred that he wished them a luxurious life and corpulence, and that he “regarded pot bellies as an ornament and a thing to be desired.” From its context, however, the meaning of the word “thin” is clear. What Luther means is: How few of them remain in the land of the living.