Combined with the mental originality, the habit of deciding all questions for himself and as if they had never before received solutions, which made Beethoven so pronounced a non-conformist in all matters from his toilet to his religion, was a physical peculiarity that underlay much of what was grotesque about him. This was the nervous irritability inherited from his grandmother. His moodiness, his sudden alternations of depressed and excited states, his bursts of uncontrollable anger, his wild pranks and practical jokes, were almost beyond doubt the result of an unstable nervous system. So restless was he that he was continually changing his lodgings; once it was because there was not enough sun, again because he disliked the water, another time because his landlord insisted on making him deep obeisances; in the later part of his life, when his habits were well known, he had difficulty in finding rooms anywhere in Vienna. He put little restraint upon his tongue; Schindler says that “the propriety of repressing offensive remarks was a thing that never entered his thoughts.” After hearing a concerto of Ries, he wrote a furious letter to a musical paper, enjoining Ries no longer to call himself his pupil. This his friends persuaded him not to send. He was so impatient that he often took the medicines intended for an entire day in two doses; so absent-minded that he often forgot them altogether. A badly cooked stew he threw at the waiter, eggs that were not fresh at the cook. To a lady who had asked for a lock of his hair he sent, at the suggestion of a friend, a lock cut from a goat’s beard; and when the joke was discovered he apologized to the lady, but cut off all intercourse with the friend. An English observer wrote that “One unlucky question, one ill-judged piece of advice, was sufficient to estrange him from you forever.” Even on his best friends and his patrons, he wreaked his ill-humors. When Prince Lobkowitz, to whom he owed much, had been so unfortunate as to offend him, he went into his court-yard, shook his fist at the house, and cried “Lobkowitz donkey, Lobkowitz donkey.” It is not hard to see why casual acquaintances, who knew nothing of the noble qualities behind his stormy and perverse exterior, frequently thought him mad.