The literary activity which he developed at this time was gigantic.  Up to 1517 he had printed little.  From that time on he was not only the most productive but the greatest popular writer of Germany.  The energy of his style, the vigor of his argumentation, the ardor and passion of his conviction, carried away his readers.  No one had ever spoken thus to the people.  His language lent itself to every mood, to all keys; now brief, forcible, sharp as steel, now in majestic breadth, the words poured in among the people like a mighty stream.  A figurative expression, a striking simile, made the most difficult thoughts intelligible.  His was a wonderfully creative power.  He used language with sovereign ease.  As soon as he touched a pen his mind worked with the greatest freedom; his sentences show the cheerful warmth which filled him, the perfect charm of sympathetic creation is poured out upon them.  And such power is by no means least apparent in the attacks which he makes upon individual opponents, and it is closely connected with a fault which caused misgivings even to his admiring contemporaries.  He liked to play with his opponents.  His imagination clothed the form of an enemy with a grotesque mask, and he teased, scorned, and stabbed this picture of his imagination with turns of speech which had not always the grace of moderation, or even of decency; but in the midst of vituperation, his good humor generally had a conciliatory effect—­although, to be sure, not upon his victims.  Petty spite was rarely visible; not seldom the most imperturbable good-nature.  Sometimes he fell into a true artistic zeal, forgot the dignity of the reformer, and pinched like a German peasant boy, even like a malicious goblin.  What blows he gave to all his opponents, now with a club, wielded by an angry giant, now with a jester’s bauble!  He liked to twist their names into ridiculous forms, and thus they lived in Wittenberg circles as beasts, or as fools.  Eck became Dr. Geck; Murner was adorned with the head and claws of a cat; Emser, who had printed at the head of most of his pamphlets his coat-of-arms the head of a horned goat, was abused as a goat.  The Latin name of the renegade humanist Cochlaeus, was retranslated, and Luther greeted him as a snail with impenetrable armor, and—­sad to say—­sometimes also as a dirty boy whose nose needed wiping.  Still worse, terrible even to his contemporaries, was the reckless violence with which he declaimed against hostile princes.  It is true that he sometimes bestowed upon his sovereign’s cousin, Duke George of Saxony, a consideration hardly to be avoided.  Each considered the other the prey of the devil, but in secret each esteemed in the other a manly worth.  Again and again they fell into dissension, even in writing, but again and again Luther prayed warmly for his neighbor’s soul.  The reckless wilfulness of Henry VIII. of England, on the other hand, offended the German reformer to the depths of his soul; he reviled him horribly and without