Undoubtedly, however, this annoying and wearying burden of the flesh has a great deal to do with William’s disposition towards nervous excitability and restlessness. A man with the earache cannot be expected to hold calm mastery over all his moods. It is a reasonable assumption, too, that to this affliction is in some measure due his phenomenal and unseasonable physical activity. Sometimes it happens that he is unable to sleep at all, and he habitually keeps notebooks and pencils within reach of his bedside, upon which to work until the demon of insomnia is exorcised. Upon occasion, for distraction, he routs out the garrison of Berlin, or some regiment of it, before daybreak. In any case he rises at five.
Both at home and when abroad the amount of labour he gets through in a day is almost without parallel. It is a commonplace experience for him to do four hours’ work in his Berlin study in the early morning; then take a train to Potsdam and spend the remainder of the forenoon in reviewing troops; then trot back in the saddle with his staff over the distance of eighteen miles; devote the afternoon to the transaction of business with his Ministers and officials; receive and return the calls of two or three visiting royal personages; then dine somewhere where a speech must be made, and get back to the palace for more work before bedtime.
In Constantinople and the scarcely less Oriental Athens they still recall his energetic daily routine with bewildered astonishment. He was up long before the drowsy muezzins from the minarets summon the faithful at the hour of prayer--rattling indefatigably about to see all the sights, reviewing the Sultan’s troops, inspecting all the chief military establishments, War Ministry, military school, artillery barracks, and what not besides, asking questions of everybody who had anything to tell, peering into every nook and cranny with an insatiable curiosity, working through it all upon notes of instruction and reference to be forwarded to Berlin every evening, and then sitting up until all the others were yawning with sleep.
Of course he could not bear the strain of this constant activity if he were not endowed with two great gifts--prodigious physical vitality and imagination. Mere strength alone, mated with dulness of mind, would be broken down and destroyed by the wear and tear of such a life. William is, physically and mentally, the heir of the best things which European royalty has to offer. He inherits the bodily force and resolution of the Hohenzollerns, the _savoir faire_ and comeliness of the Guelphs, the intellectual acuteness and philosophical tastes of the Coburgs, and the romantic mediaeval Ascanien strain which Catherine II took to Russia and her granddaughter brought back again to Weimar--a leaven half divine half daemonic, which swings between genius and madness. The product of these marriages might be expected to be what he is--by far the most striking personality in the whole gallery of contemporary kings.