difficult to keep his surroundings tolerable even in the comparatively sumptuous home in which he closed his days. The frank confessions of the Autobiography reveal the fact, that the irregularity, which characterised the life of Maimon, sometimes led to a breach of the weightier matters of the law. The habit, which he began in Poland, of seeking relief from external discomfort and internal wretchedness in alcoholic stimulation, grew upon him afterwards; and as his health began to fail, he used to treat his various complaints by a liberal allowance of various wines and beers which he supposed adapted to their cure.[87] The liberal allowance was very apt, especially in the evenings, to exceed all reasonable moderation; and the sleepy inhabitants of Berlin were not infrequently disturbed by the half-tipsy philosopher, as he wended his way unsteadily homewards at unseasonable hours, discoursing on all sorts of speculative themes in disagreeably loud tones that were occasionally interrupted by the expostulations of a night-watchman.[88] The peculiarly undisciplined manners of Maimon were occasionally shown in violent outbursts of various feelings. Too frequently it was an irritable temper that gave way. The slightest provocation, even the loss of a game at chess,[89] was apt to cause a painful explosion; and then his language was certainly far from being restrained by those usages which are found essential to the pleasantness of social intercourse.[90] The uncontrollable violence of these outbursts was amusingly exhibited in the fact, that sometimes he could not command the intellectual calm requisite for thinking and expressing himself in his acquired German, and, even though it might be a Gentile with whom he quarrelled, he fell back on his Judæo-Polish mother tongue, which came to him as if by natural instinct.[91] It is but fair, however, to add that these outbursts were often merely the unusually forcible, but not altogether unjustifiable, utterances of an honest indignation at wrong.[92]