Albert, Elector of Mayence, “is a plague to all Germany; the ghastly, yellow, earthen hue of his countenance--a mixture of mud and blood--exactly fits his character; ... he is deserving of death under the First Table” (viz. because of his transgression of the first commandments of the Decalogue by his utter godlessness).[975] It was, however, not so much on account of his moral shortcomings, notorious though they were, but more particularly because he did not take his side, that Luther regarded him as a “most perfidious rogue” (“_nebulo perfidissimus_”). “If thieves are hanged, then surely the Bishop of Mayence deserves to be hanged as one of the first, on a gallows seven times as high as the Giebenstein.... For he fears neither God nor man.”[976] When Simon Lemnius, the Humanist, praised Archbishop Albert in a few epigrams, Luther’s anger turned against the poet, whom he soundly rated for making “a saint out of a devil.” He issued a sort of mandate against Lemnius of which the conclusion was: “I beg our people, and particularly the poets or his [the Archbishop’s] sycophants, in future not publicly to praise the shameful merd-priest”; he threatens sharp measures should anyone at Wittenberg dare to praise “the self-condemned lost priest.”[977] The satirical list of relics which, in 1542, he published with a preface and epilogue against the same Elector amounted practically to a libel, and was described by lawyers as a lying slander punishable at law. As a “_libellus famosus_” against a reigning Prince of the Empire it might have entailed serious consequences for its author. In it Luther says: The Elector, as we learn, is offering “big pardons for many sins,” even for sins to be committed for the next ten years, to all who “help in decking out in new clothes the poor, naked bones”; the relics in question, during their translation from Halle to Mayence, had, so Luther tells us, been augmented by other “particles,” enriched by the Pope with Indulgences, amongst them, “(1) a fine piece of the left horn of Moses; (2) three flames from the bush of Moses on Mount Sinai; (3) two feathers and one egg of the Holy Ghost,” etc., in all, twelve articles, specially chosen to excite derision.