Austria also felt her humiliation too deeply not to be inspired, like Prussia, with an instinct of self-preservation. The imperial dignity and catholicism were here closely associated with the memory of the Middle Ages, whose magnificence and grandeur were once more disclosed to the people in the masterly productions of the writers of the day. Hence the unison created by Frederick Schlegel between the romantic poets and antiquarians of Germany and Viennese policy. The predilection for ancient German art and poetry had, in the literary world, been merely produced by the reaction of German intelligence against foreign imitation; this literary reaction, however, happened coincidently with and aided that in the political world. The Nibelungen, the Minnesingers, the ancient chronicles, became a popular study. The same enthusiasm inspired the liberal-spirited poets, Tieck, Arnim, and Brentano; Fouqué charmed the rising generation and the multitude with his extravagant descriptions of the age of chivalry; the learned researches of Grimm, Hagen, Busching, Gräter, etc., into German antiquity, at that time, excited general interest, but the glowing colors in which Joseph Gorres, himself a former Jacobin, and amid the half Gallicized inhabitants of Coblentz, revived, as if by magic, the Middle Age on the ruin-strewed banks of the Rhine caused the deepest delight. Two men, Stein, now a refugee in Austria, and Count Munster, first of all Hanoverian minister and afterward English ambassador at Petersburg, who kept up a constant correspondence with Stein and conducted the secret negotiations in the name of Great Britain, were unwearied in their endeavors to forge arms against Napoleon. In Austria, Count John Philip von Stadion, who had, since the December of 1805, been placed at the head of the ministry, had both the power and the will to repair the blunders committed by Thugut and Cobenzl.