"Everything conspired in Beethoven to make his utterance authentic, strong, unqualified--like a gushing spring which leaps from the inaccessible depths of the mountain. His solitary habits kept his mind clear from the mud and sediment which the market-place and the forum mistake for thought; his deafness coming on at so early an age (twenty-eight), increased this effect, it left him fancy-free in the world of music; Wagner even mentions the excessive thickness of his skull (ascertained long after his death), as suggesting the special isolation of his brain. From a boy Beethoven was a great reader. He fed his mind in his own way. Unlike the musicians who went before him, he could brook no dependence upon condescending nobilities. He was not going to be a Court fool. The man who could rush into the courtyard of his really sincere friend and 'patron,' Prince Lobkowitz, and shout 'Lobkowitz donkey, Lobkowitz donkey,' for all the valets and chambermaids to hear; or who could leave his humble lodgings because the over-polite landlord of the house would insist on doffing his hat each time they passed on the stairs; must have had 'something of the devil in him!' (This was the verdict of Hummel, Vogler, Gelinck, and others when they first heard him improvise on his arrival at Vienna). In politics, in a quite general way, he evolved radicalism or republicanism as his creed; in religion, though nominally a Catholic, he was quite informal. A pantheist one might perhaps call him, or a mystic after Eckhardt and Tauler. Finally, one may mention, as an indication of the great range and strength of his personality, its exceedingly slow growth. While Mozart at the age of twenty-three had written a great number of Operas, Symphonies, Cantatas and Masses--many of them of quite mature character--Beethoven at the same age had little or nothing to show. His first Symphony and his Septet, which he always looked back upon as childish productions, were not written till about the age of twenty-seven; and his first great Symphony (the _Eroica_) not till he was thirty-two."--_Angels' Wings_, pp. 141-2. "Beethoven came at the culmination of a long line of musical tradition. He also came at a moment when the foundations of society were breaking away for the preparation of something new. His great strength lay in the fact that he united the old and the new. He was epic and dramatic, and held firmly to the accepted outlines and broad evolution of his art, like the musicians who went before him; he was lyrical, like those who followed, and uttered to the full his own vast individuality. And so (like the greatest artists) he transformed rather than shattered the traditions into which he was born.