His indolence so exasperated his wife Eleanor, that she said to her son Maximilian in a fit of anger, “On my word, if I thought you would be like your father, I should be ashamed of being the mother of such a king.” Frederick was too lazy, it is said, to turn the handle of a door, but kicked till some one came to open it, or he burst it in. He paid the penalty of his stupidity, for by so doing he one day hurt his foot, and as mortification threatened the surgeons cut it off. “Ah me!” said Frederick, “a healthy boot is better than a sick Emperor.” His exact opposite was Frederick the Great, who was wont to exclaim, “Nothing is nearer akin to death than idleness. It is not necessary that I should live, but it is necessary that whilst I live I be busy.” Of the many despicable traits of character of Louis XV., not one, perhaps, was more odious than his mania for speculating in corn. He became the chief partner of a company which forestalled corn. From the exceptional advantages this company enjoyed, “it created local and artificial famine in the different provinces for purposes of private gain. The King thus traded on the hunger of his people,” and, as it is added, “the most abject courtier of Versailles could not avoid feeling a twinge of shame when he noted on his bureau day by day the lists of the prices of grain in the different provinces as a guide for speculation.” From such shameful dealings arose the legend of the _Pacte de famine_, which lingered in the memories of the people, and the spectre of which arose in terrible form during the most horrible scenes of the Revolution. And Louis XI. in a capricious mood once promoted a poor priest whom he found sleeping in the porch of a church, that the proverb might be verified, that to lucky men good fortune will come even when they are asleep. Lastly, it has been said that the restlessness of Don Sebastian was the despair of his attendants. From one end to the other of his little kingdom there was a perpetual shifting of the royal quarters, “as the royal vagrant hurried in search of novelty and excitement, from Coimbra to Cape St. Vincent, from Almeirim to Alcobaça, to Salvaterra.” Impenetrable to fatigue or hardship, the day afforded too scanty a scope for his activity, and the dead of night often found him exhausting his feverish impatience of repose in long hours of solitary pacing on the sandy shores of the Tagus, or under the dense gloom of the forest arcades of Cintra. And in Sebastian we are reminded of Charles XII. of Sweden, who, determined to brave the seasons as he had done his enemies, ventured to make long marches during the cold of the memorable winter of 1709, in one of which 2000 of his men died from the cold, in allusion to which Campbell, in “The Pleasures of Hope,” writes:--