Both Hartmann and Grisar and Dr. Cabanes give substantially the same accounts of his sudden death; so probably it is assured in spite of the Catholic story that he committed suicide. For two years a stone in the bladder had added to the tortures of his Ménière’s disease, and on February 17th, 1546, his last seizure attacked him. While at Eisleben he became very restless. “Here at this little village I was baptised,” he said. “It may be that I shall remain here.” In the evening he felt that oppression in the chest of which he had so often complained, so he got his attendants to rub him down with hot flannels, and as soon as he felt better sat down to a light supper. In the middle of the night he awoke, feeling deadly ill. “O my God,” he said, “I do feel so ill; I feel as though I were dying,” and complained of a terrible oppression in his chest. His doctors found him bathed in a cold sweat and without perceptible pulse. He murmured his favourite text from St. John, “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have life everlasting.” Then he became unconscious and his friends shouted into his deaf ears the question whether he remained steadfast in his faith in Christ and his doctrine, to which they thought they heard him say “Yes,” though probably he did not hear them. At three in the morning his breathing suddenly became audible, and after a deep sigh he died. Probably this is a true account, for we often see the breathing of a dying man assume the up and down character that we call “Cheyne-Stokes.” For some extraordinary reason Messrs. Hartmann and Grisar attributed this obvious death from heart-failure to apoplexy. One can only suppose that they had never seen a man die of apoplexy; and Dr. Cabanes is undoubtedly right when he attributes it to heart-defeat after a long period of high blood-pressure. Probably a certain amount of angina pectoris also entered into the picture, which is much the same thing put into other language. But it may be that Dr. Cabanes was too materialistic in supposing that the cause of Luther’s high blood-pressure was drink, in spite of Melanchthon’s explicit statement that Luther was only a moderate drinker. Probably he was no worse than other Germans of the time; and it seems to be undoubtedly true that intense emotion can permanently so put up the blood-pressure that the patient ultimately dies even if only after a great many years; and surely no man ever strained his vascular system more terribly than Martin Luther. Luther was not a nice man; but nice men do not revolutionise the world. Henry Fielding