sed
Frederick William's true vocation in not making him an inn-keeper in a
German village instead of a king. Around this smoke-shrouded table the
most important affairs of state were discussed. Around it the rudest
practical jokes were perpetrated. Gundling, a beer-bibbing author, whom
the king made at once his historian and his butt, was the principal
sufferer from these frolics, which displayed abundantly that absence of
wit and presence of brutality which is the characteristic of the
practical joke. As if in scorn of rank and official dignity, Frederick
gave this sot and fool the title of baron and created him chancellor and
chamberlain of the palace, forcing him always to wear an absurdly
gorgeous gala dress, while to show his disdain of learned pursuits he
made him president of his Academy of Sciences, an institution which, in
its condition at that time, was suited to the presidency of a Gundling.

For these dignities he made the poor butt suffer. On one occasion the
kingly joker had a brace of bear cubs laid in Gundling's bed, and the
drunken historian tossed in between them, with little heed of the danger
to which he exposed the poor victim of his sport. On another occasion,
when Gundling grew sullen and refused to leave his room, the king and
his boon companions besieged him with rockets and crackers, which they
flung in at the open window. A third and more elaborate trick was the
following. The king had the door of Gundling's room walled up, so that
the drunken dupe wandered the palace halls the whole night long, vainly
seeking his vanished door, getting into wrong rooms, disturbing sleepers
to ask whither his room had flown, and making the palace almost as
uncomfortable for its other inmates as for himself. He ended his journey
in the bear's den, where he got a severe hug for his pains.

Such were the ideas of royal dignity, of art, science, and learning, and
of wit and humor, entertained by the first King of Prussia, the
coarse-mannered and brutal-minded progenitor of one of the greatest of
modern monarchs. His ideas of military power were no wiser or more
elevated. His whole soul was set on having a play army, a brigade of
tall recruits, whose only merit lay in their inches above the ordinary
height of humanity. Much of the revenues of the kingdom were spent upon
these giants, whom he had brought from all parts of Europe, by strategy
and force where cash and persuasion did not avail. His agents were
everywh