A few months later Hübner succeeded Bach, and the Liberal system was inaugurated. Széchényi was wild with joy; from his humble room he encouraged the minister, sent him plans of reform, inspired or wrote papers on the renewal of Austria, not forgetting Hungary. The dream was soon dissipated; Hübner was succeeded by Thierry, a bad disciple of Bach, armed with the old and superannuated systems of Austria; all reform was abandoned. The unfortunate Széchényi resisted sorrowfully; he called Rechberg, begged him to inform the Emperor of his mistake while there was still time, and submitted programmes for an Austrian constitution and a Hungarian constitution, internal affairs to be treated separately, and external affairs conjointly. Rechberg, far less foreseeing than this inspired madman, said, shaking his head: “One can easily see that this project comes from a lunatic asylum.” Worse still, Thierry, suspecting a vulgar conspirator in the great Magyar, sent a troop of police to visit the asylum, threatened to imprison him, and deprived him of his papers. The unhappy man, whose madness was merely an irresistible need to serve his country at all costs, had only one remorse; he feared he had not sufficiently served his country, and henceforth all hopes were closed. He sought in vain to stifle his poignant grief by playing desperately at chess. At last he shot himself with a revolver. That was on the 8th of April, 1860. In 1867, Francis Joseph was crowned King of Hungary, thus realizing the dreams of the Döbling lunatic; and Rechberg, who had laughed at them, was called upon to put them in practice. E. T. A. Hoffmann, that strange poet, artist, and musician, whose drawings ended in caricature, his tales in extravagance, and his music in a mere medley of sound, but who was, nevertheless, the real creator of fantastic poetry, was a drunkard. Many years before his death he wrote in his journal: “How is it that, awake or asleep, my thoughts are always running, in spite of myself, on this miserable theme of madness? Disorderly ideas seem to rise out of my mind like blood from opened veins.” He was so sensitive to atmospheric variations that he constructed a meteorological scale out of his subjective emotions. For many years he was subject to a real monomania of persecution, with hallucinations in which the fantasies of his stories were converted into realities.