The nephew was now attending the philological lectures at the university and living in the winter and spring months with his uncle. He had left Blöchlinger’s Institute in August 1823 and matriculated at the university. He was active in the service of Beethoven, doing work as his amanuensis, carrying messages, making purchases, and so on; in fact, Beethoven seems to have taken up more of his time than was good for his studies. He loved him tenderly and was unceasingly thoughtful of his welfare; but the jealousy of his affection led him to exercise a strictness of discipline over him which could not fail to become irksome to a growing stripling. He left him little liberty, and, yielding to a disposition prone to passion, he not seldom treated him with great severity. The youth appears in the Conversation Books as lively, clever and shrewd, and Beethoven, proud of his natural gifts of mind, was indulgent of his comments on others, permitting him apparently to speak lightly and discourteously of the men upon whose help and counsel he was obliged to depend. The result of Beethoven’s extremes of harsh rebuke and loving admonition, of violent accusation and tender solicitude, was to encourage him in his innate bent for disingenuousness and deception, and he continued the course which he had begun as a boy of repeating words of disparagement touching those against whom his uncle levelled his criticisms, and of reporting, no doubt with embellishments of his own invention, the speeches which told of the popular admiration in which the great composer was held. By this species of flattery he played upon the weakness of his uncle and actually obtained an influence over him in the course of time which he exploited to his own advantage in various directions. He was naturally inclined to indolence and self-indulgence, and it is not strange that Beethoven’s self-sacrifice in his behalf never awakened in him any deep sense of gratitude, while his unreasonable and ill-considered severity aroused a spirit of rebellion in him which grew with his advance towards adolescence. Beethoven never seems to have realized that he had outgrown the period when he could be treated as a child, and it was a child’s submission which he asked of him.