I rejoiced to see the patriarchal customs of the Regent, Prince Luitpold. I had not then much experience of politics, and only saw the surface of things. The impatient insubordination of Bavaria to Prussia, from which a more intelligent and less divided Europe might have derived so much advantage, escaped me. I only saw in the Regent a character out of one of Topfer's stories. He devoted the greater part of his time, even in his old age, to physical exercises. Shooting and swimming were his favourite pastimes. He bathed every day all the year round in one of the large ponds on his estate in Nymphenburg. And when he was not shooting he was walking. His outward appearance gave no indication of his rank. I met him one autumn day in Vienna in one of the little streets off the Prater behind the Lusthaus; he was in his shirt sleeves; his coat and top hat were hanging on the point of the walking-stick which he carried over his shoulder. He seemed happier than a king. His inseparable companion, a poodle no less shaggy and hairy than his master, accompanied him. They looked exactly like one another. At a distance a nearsighted person might easily have mistaken the dog for the Regent and the Regent for the dog. Louis III, his son and successor, inherited his father's simple tastes, which he believed he could simplify still more. But excess in anything is a mistake. His abuse of simplicity was practically his only way of making a mark in contemporaneous history. History will not preserve the memory of this mediocre King of Bavaria, but it will remember his unfashionable clothes, his concertina trousers, his square boots with rubber heels and his wrinkled socks, by which he wished to demonstrate his democratic tastes. He would have done better to have recollected that the duty of a king is to raise the man in the street to the level of the throne, and not to let the king descend to the level of the man in the street. He was not popular, owing to his bad taste. In vain he paraded his love of beer, coarse jokes, sausages and skittles. The Bavarians remembered Louis II as a good king, and at the same time as a grandly spectacular king. People are flattered when a king who is a king unbends to them, but if he looks like a carter they experience no pride in seeing him drive the chariot of State as if it were a cart. The Court of Bavaria, which had slightly retrieved its former position before 1914, fell between Scylla and Charybdis when the Crown Prince of Bavaria and the Man of Berlin played with the thunderbolts of war. The Wittelsbachs vanished like smoke in the defeat of Prussian ambitions. They might still have been at Munich if they had furthered legitimate Bavarian ambitions, and judged them from the exclusive point of view of the political and religious needs of their country.