During all this while, and to the very end, Friedrich's Affairs, great and small, were, in every branch and item, guided on by him, with a perfection not surpassed in his palmiest days: he saw his Ministers, saw all who had business with him, many who had little; and in the sore coil of bodily miseries, as Hertzberg observed with wonder, never was the King's intellect clearer, or his judgment more just and decisive. Of his disease, except to the Doctors, he spoke no word to anybody. The body of Friedrich is a ruin, but his soul is still here; and receives his friends and his tasks as formerly. Asthma, dropsy, erysipelas, continual want of sleep; for many months past he has not been in bed, but sits day and night in an easy-chair, unable to get breath except in that posture. He said one morning, to somebody entering, "If you happened to want a night-watcher, I could suit you well." His multifarious Military businesses come first; then his three Clerks, with the Civil and Political. These three he latterly, instead of calling about 6 or 7 o'clock, has had to appoint for 4 each morning: "My situation forces me," his message said, "to give them this trouble, which they will not have to suffer long. My life is on the decline; the time which I still have I must employ. It belongs not to me, but to the State." [Preuss, iv. 257 n.] About 11, business, followed by short surgical details or dressings (sadly insisted on in those Books, and in themselves sufficiently sad), being all done,--his friends or daily company are admitted: five chiefly, or (NOT counting Minister Hertzberg) four, Lucchesini, Schwerin, Pinto, Gortz; who sit with him about one hour now, and two hours in the evening again:--dreary company to our minds, perhaps not quite so dreary to the King's; but they are all he has left. And he talks cheerfully with them "on Literature, History, on the topics of the day, or whatever topic rises, as if there were no sickness here." A man adjusted to his hard circumstances; and bearing himself manlike and kinglike among them.