Meantime the King of Prussia occupied himself with the institution of the new Order of the Swan and with architectural plans. He proposed the erection of a great Hermann monument on the Rhine, as a demonstration against constitutional France; and he set the builders to work again on the Cathedral of Cologne, after a pause of 300 years. This latter undertaking was considered symbolical, not from the national but from the ecclesiastical point of view. It gave Heine occasion for various protests and erroneous prophecies in _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_, and also gave occasion to Strauss's clever pamphlet, _Der Romantiker auf dem Trone der Cäsaren_, in which he manages to describe Julian the Apostate as the enthusiastic religious reactionary, in such a way that the parallel with Frederick William IV. suggests itself without being pointed out. The new literature, to which the king was distinctly inimical, soon began to return his enmity with interest. He established Tieck, the fretful, crippled old man, at Sans Souci as poet-laureate, and Schelling, the mystifier, in Berlin as _summus philosophus_. He caused the _Antigone_ of Sophocles and the _Medea_ of Euripides to be performed in the theatres of Berlin and Potsdam, in hopes of thereby counteracting the spirit of unrest in German literature. But that literature went its own way. [1] Examples of Frederick William's style of wit: When the king was at the play, lackeys stood in attendance outside the door of the royal box. One evening, when his Majesty, provoked by the tiresomeness of a new play, left his box before the close of the performance, he found one of the lackeys sitting on the floor of the passage, sound asleep, his head leant against the wall of the box. Instead of being angry, the king said: "Der hat gehorcht" (means both: He has listened, and: He has obeyed). In 1848, in the palmy days of the Revolution, the king was obliged to receive one deputation after another, sometimes of very pretentious and presumptuous common people. He addressed the members of one such deputation, one after the other. What are you?--A silk and woollen cloth warehouseman, your Majesty.--Most interesting occupation. And you?--A medical student.--Excellent preparation for taking part in the government of the country! And so on, all the time with a most polite, if ironical, smile. (Told me by an eye-witness.) [2] The king was at one time deeply interested in the mysteries of table-turning, but it was long before any of the palace tables could be persuaded to perform, a fact which did not surprise Humboldt. At last the king received him one morning with the exclamation: "Aha! what do you say now? We sat round the table for a full half-hour last night before it would move, but at last off it went, round and round, faster and faster. How do you explain that?" "Why, your Majesty, in all disputes it's the wiser of the two that gives in." (Related by Humboldt himself.) [3]