From the autobiography and the letters to Apel we can get an excellent idea of what he was in his boyhood. He came of a family of rather more than average ability. As a child he was nervous, excitable and imaginative, impatient of control either at home or in school, but quick enough to assimilate life and knowledge in his own way. It is clear, both from what he says in Mein Leben and from scattered hints in that book and in his letters, that he was occasionally a source of great anxiety to his relations. Already he had a bias towards the theatre, which would be increased by his frequent association with actors and singers.[44] For a time he haunted the smaller gambling dens of Leipzig—even going so far on one occasion as to stake his mother\'s pension—entered into the usual students\' follies and dissipations, and generally must have seemed to the ordinary eye as complete a young wastrel as could be imagined. He himself tells us: "I bore, as if in a state of complete stupor, even the contempt of my sister Rosalie, who, like my mother, hardly vouchsafed a glance at the incomprehensible young profligate (Wüstling), whose pale and troubled face they only rarely saw."[45] He picks up the rudiments of a general and of a musical education. Then he knocks about from one small theatrical troupe to another, his character inevitably coarsening and relaxing in the process. He was at this time extraordinarily sensitive to his environment; and as this was as a rule of an intellectually superficial kind, he came to take the average actor\'s or singer\'s superficial view of life and art. And as from his boyhood he was hopelessly incapable of managing his financial affairs with any prudence, and soon acquired that habit of borrowing from friends and eluding tradespeople that clung to him for the greater part of his life, the iron was not long in entering into his soul. So rich a nature as his could of course afford to waste itself extravagantly, and in the end no doubt his art was all the better for his having eaten so freely of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; but to the relations and companions who cared for him in those early years he must often have seemed to be wasting himself beyond all power of recovery. His life until long past his fiftieth year resembles a ship steering with incredible recklessness among every sort of shoal and rock. More than once it looked as if the vessel would founder; only a unique combination of courage and determination and extraordinary good fortune managed to keep it afloat and bring it finally into haven.