Another less unreliable report also has to do with Luther’s death-bed. Johann Landau, the Mansfeld apothecary, who was a Catholic, and had occasion to handle Luther’s corpse, left the following in the notes he made: “In consequence of excessive eating and drinking the body was full of corrupt juices,” Luther had “exceeded in the use of sweet foreign wines.” “It is said,” he continues, “that he drank every day at noon and in the evening a sextar of rich foreign wine.”[997] This statement does not appear to be restricted to the last days of Luther’s life, which were spent with Count Mansfeld. It is well known that Luther died after a meal. What amount the “sextar” and the “stuebchen,” to be mentioned immediately, represented has not yet been determined, as the measures differed so much in various parts of the country. The sextar, according to G. Agricola, was usually a quarter of the stuebchen, as, according to him, twenty-four sextars or six stuebchen went to one amphora; the sextar itself contained four gills.[998] In a letter of Luther’s, dating from the period of his stay at Mansfeld, we find the following: “We live well here,” he writes to Katey, “and the council allows me for each meal half a gallon of excellent Rheinfall. Sometimes I drink it with my companions. The wine produced here is also good and the Naumburg beer quite capital.”[999] Rheinfall (more correctly Reinfal) was a southern wine then highly prized.[1000] Luther, as a rule, preferred to keep to Naumburg beer.[1001] _Luther’s Own Comments on the “Good Drink.”_ The following statements of Luther’s concerning his indulgence in spirituous liquors are especially noteworthy; of these some have been quoted without sufficient attention being paid to their real meaning. “Know that all goes well with me here,” Luther writes in 1540 from Weimar to his Katey, who was anxious about him; “I feed like a Bohemian, and swill like a German, for which God be thanked, Amen.”[1002] Soon after he repeats, in a letter to the same addressee, the phrase which has since grown famous, this time in a slightly amended form: Know “that we are well and cheerful here, thanks be to God; we feed like Bohemians, though not too much, and swill like Germans, not deeply but with jollity.”[1003] He is fond of thus speaking of his “feeding and swilling,” though, such expressions being less unconventional then than now, stress must not be laid on them. In both letters he was clearly seeking by his jests to reassure his wife, who was concerned for his health. During his last weeks at Eisleben he also wrote to Katey: “We have plenty on which to feed and swill.”[1004] “If the Lord God holds me excused,” he says in a famous utterance in the Table-Talk, “for having plagued Him for quite twenty years by celebrating Mass, He assuredly will excuse me for sometimes indulging in a drink to His honour; God grant it and let the world take it as it will.”[1005]