Gifted with a keen sense of the ridiculous, it had been, in his younger days, almost a second nature to him to delight in drollery and particularly to clothe his ideas in playful imagery. His mind was indeed an inexhaustible source of rich and homely humour. Nature had indeed endowed Luther from his cradle with that rare talent of humour which, amidst the trials of life, easily proves more valuable than a gold mine to him who has it. During his secular studies at Erfurt he had been able to give full play to this tendency as some relief after the hardships of early days. His preference for Terence, Juvenal, Plautus and Horace amongst the classic poets leads us to infer that he did so; and still more does Mathesius’s description, who says that, at that time, he was a “brisk and jolly fellow.” Monastic life and, later, his professorship and the strange course on which he entered must for a while have placed a rein on his humour, but it broke out all the more strongly when be brought his marvellous powers of imagination and extraordinary readiness in the use of the German tongue to the literary task of bringing over the masses to his new ideas. Anyone desirous of winning the hearts of the German masses has always had to temper earnestness with jest, for a sense of humour is part of the nation’s birthright. The fact that Luther touched this chord was far more efficacious in securing for him loud applause and a large following than all his rhetoric and theological arguments. _Humour in his Writings and at his Home_ It was in his polemics that Luther first turned to account his gift of humour; his manner of doing so was anything but refined. The first of his German controversial works against a literary opponent was his “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome wider dem hochberumpten Romanisten tzu Leiptzk”[1247] (the Franciscan Alveld or Alfeld), dating from May and June, 1520. Here he starts with a comical description of the “brave heroes in the market place at Leipzig, so well armed as we have never seen the like before. Their helmets they wear on their feet, their swords on their heads, their shields and breastplates hang down their back, and their lances they grip by the blade.... If Leipzig can produce such giants then that land must indeed be fertile.” On the last page of the same writing he puts the concluding touch to his work by telling Alveld, the “rude miller’s beast,” that he does “not yet know how to bray his hee-haw, hee-haw”; were I, says Luther, “to permit all the wantonness of these thick-heads even the very washerwomen would end by writing against me.” “What really helps it if a poor frog [like this fellow] blows himself out? Even were he to swell himself out to bursting-point he would never equal an ox.”