At a somewhat later date the king extended his patronage to Christian Scherenberg, whose poems, more especially the battle-pieces _Waterloo_ and _Abukir_, were much admired at court--the author himself had to read them aloud. Even as an octogenarian, Scherenberg retained his place as a favourite in Berlin society. He was born in 1798. His life had been a hard struggle. After the dissolution of his unhappy marriage, he lived, from 1833 to 1840, in rooms in a small house at the corner of the Bendlerstrasse, looking towards the Zoological Gardens, in such poverty that he could not afford to buy firewood, and had to send his children to gather sticks in the Gardens. He wrote poems, tragedies, and comedies, for which he could never find a publisher; nevertheless he was so successful in his attempts to keep up the appearance of a gentleman, that his relations in Stettin believed he had won fame under an assumed name, and begged him to "remove his mask" and let them into the secret. All that his pen brought him was what he received for composing begging letters and for copying; the rest of his living he gained by acting as tutor to the families of the gardeners who lived in the neighbourhood, giving lessons which, according to agreement, were paid for in potatoes. A pretty story is told by Fontane in his _Life of Scherenberg_. Great hopes had been entertained in the Bendlerstrasse that a certain long-deferred payment would be made at Easter in the shape of a juicy roast of veal; but in place of this, the pupil, in his innocent desire to give pleasure, appeared with a lark in a little green cage. On Easter morning, 1840, Scherenberg himself carried the cage out to an open field, set the lark free, and wrote the sweet poem, one verse of which runs: "Du, Vöglein, singst, das ist das Deine, Hub leise ich zur Lerche an, Ich geb' dich frei, das ist das Meine, Ein Jeder bete, wie er kann."[3] The poor, struggling poet let the lark go, but kept its little clay water-dish as a remembrance, promoting it to be his ink-pot. At last his poems caught the fancy of the public, and the king, delighted with the originality and rugged energy of the battle-pieces, took their author into favour. The only thing connected with the time when he read aloud at court that Scherenberg could be persuaded to talk about, was the pleasure of the half-hour before the reading, spent in his friend Count Bismarck-Bohlen's room, where men joked and smoked, and afterwards drenched themselves with Eau de Cologne, because the king disliked the smell of tobacco. Many years later there was another potentate in Berlin at whose court Scherenberg was an attendant. This was Ferdinand Lassalle. At his house the poet met livelier companions, in whose society he not infrequently permitted himself to make fun of his royal and aristocratic patrons. It was in his nature to suit himself to his company; his court friends knew his weakness and excused him.