His condition, therefore, never improved. He continued during his later years to work at various literary employments; but the remuneration he obtained for these was never sufficient for his subsistence. His works appealed to a very limited public. He had consequently often to go a-begging for a publisher, and to content himself with what slight honorarium the reluctant publishers chose to give.[70] The literary hack-work, of which he was obliged to do a good deal, brought him no better return. That sort of labour was probably as poorly paid in Berlin at the time as in the Grub Street of last century. He was therefore at times reduced to utter beggary. Many of his earlier friends, as appears from the Autobiography, had lost patience with him; and some, who had helped him before, when he was forced by sheer starvation to apply to them afterwards, treated him as a common beggar, dismissing him with a copper in charity (_Zehrpfennig_), and at times with unnecessarily cold, even insulting language.[71] If we add to this the fact, that his irregular habits often made him the victim of unscrupulous men,[72] it will not seem surprising that he sometimes fell into a bitter tone and harsh judgments about his friends,[73] or that he was apt occasionally to burst out into pretty strong language of general misanthropy.[74] Perhaps Maimon might have risen out of the chronic destitution, to which he seemed doomed, if he had cultivated in any degree the virtue of thrift. But thriftlessness, as the Autobiography shows, had been an hereditary vice in his family, at least for two generations before him; and though he gives vivid pictures of its pitiable results in the households of his grandfather and father, he never made any effort to rise above it himself. Whenever he obtained any remuneration for his work, instead of husbanding it economically till he obtained more, he usually squandered it at once in extravagancies, often of a useless, sometimes of a reprehensible kind.[75] He points out in his first chapter, that his grandfather might have been a rich man if he had kept accounts of income and expenditure. But his friend Wolff, has to confess that, good mathematician as Maimon was, he never seemed to think of the difference between _plus_ and _minus_ in money-matters.[76] With such a character one of Maimon's friends was not far from the truth, when on a fresh application for assistance, he dismissed him, too harshly perhaps, with the blunt remark, "People like you there is no use in trying to help."[77] Certainly help was not to be found in Maimon himself, and it is difficult to see how he could have avoided the chance of a miserable death by actual starvation, had it not been that a generous home was at last opened to him, where he closed his days in comfort and peace.