Where Luther battered down, he undermined.

[Sidenote: Methods of argument] Even when he argued against an opinion he called his polemic a "Conversation"-- for that is the true meaning of the word Diatribe.

With choice of soft vocabulary, of attenuated forms, of double negatives, he tempered exquisitely his Latin.

Did he doubt anything?
Hardly, "he had a shade of doubt" (_subdubito_).

Did he think he wrote well?
Not at all, but he confessed that he produced "something more like Latin than the average" (_paulo latinius_).