From the commencement of his struggle, however, until the end of his life his extreme nervous irritability found expression in the violence of what he said and wrote. There can be no question that, had he not been in a morbidly nervous state, he would never have given way to such outbursts of anger and brutal invective. “There was a demoniacal trait,” says a Protestant Luther biographer, “that awakened in him as soon as he met an adversary, at which even his fellow-monks had shuddered, and which carried him much further than he had at first intended.” He became the “rudest writer of his age.” In his controversy with the Swiss Sacramentarians he “was domineering and high-handed.” “His disputatiousness and tendency to pick a quarrel grew ever stronger in him after his many triumphs.”[340]—But, even among his friends and in his home, he was careless about controlling his irritation. We find him exclaiming: “I am bursting with anger and annoyance”; as we know, he excited himself almost “to death” about a nephew and threatened to have a servant-maid “drowned in the Elbe.”[341] (Cp. the passages from A. Cramer quoted below, towards the end of section 5.) Other maladies and indispositions, of which the effects were sometimes lasting, also deserve to be alluded to. Of these the principal and worst was calculus of which we first hear in 1526 and then again in 1535, 1536 and 1545. In Feb., 1537, Luther was overtaken by so severe an attack at Schmalkalden that his end seemed near.—In 1525 he had to complain of painful hæmorrhoids, and at the beginning of 1528 similar troubles recurred. The “_malum Franciæ_,” on the other hand, cursorily mentioned in 1523,[342] is not heard of any more. The severe constipation from which he suffered in the Wartburg also passed away. Luther was also much subject to catarrh, which, when it lasted, caused acute mental depression. The “discharge in his left leg” which continued for a considerable while[343] during 1533 had no important after-effects. The maladies just mentioned, to which must be added an attack of the “English Sweat,” in 1529, do not afford sufficient grounds for any diagnosis of his physical and mental state in general.[344] On the other hand, the oppression in the præcordial region and his nervous excitability are of great importance to whoever would investigate his general state of health. _The so-called Temptations no Mere Morbid Phenomena_