Vico. 629 appointment is evident, for from this time, he says, he concluded that his country would not allow him to serve her, but his only revenge was to apply himself to the com- pletion of the work which he meditated. He would not forget that she was his parent, though she was a stern one who never caressed her child ^. In the year 1725 accordingly he published the Scienza Nuova, in which the principles which he had exhibited indistinctly and without order in his former works were at length presented in a systematic form. The remainder of his days was past in poverty and domestic sorrow ; one of his children to whom he was tenderly attached, and to whose education he had devoted much of his time, languished in a tedious and severe disorder; and another, by the irregularities of his conduct, compelled him to demand his confinement. But Vicos was a spirit, which calamity could not long or wholly overcloud ; in his deep religious feeling and his conviction that he had established by his writings the proof of a wise and benevolent Providence controuling the course of human affairs, he had a source of consolation which never failed him, while his intellect remained. " Providence,^"* says he in a letter written soon after the pub- lication of the Scienza Nuova, even when it seems to our feeble view only a severe justice, is really kindness and love. Since I have completed my great work, I seem to have put on a new man. I am no longer tempted to declaim against the bad taste of the age, since by refusing me the office which I sought, it has led me to compose the Scienza Nuova. The composition of this work, if I am not deceived, has filled me with an heroic spirit, which places me above the fear of death and the calumny of my rivals. I feel myself on a rock of adamant, when I think on the judgement of God, who does justice to genius by the esteem of the wise .**' On the accession of the house of Bourbon to the throne of Naples in 1735, his condition was in some respects improved ; he was named historiographer to the king, and his son Gennaro succeeded him in his professorship ; but these marks of favour came too late to give much pleasure to Vico, whose powers were already exhausted, and after remaining fourteen 3 Vita di G. B. Vico, p. 60, with a sonnet of Vico's quoted by Michelet, p. 64.
- Michelet, Discours sur le Systeme et le Vie de Vico, p. 47-
