he cries in two mournful lines of a sonnet in 1735. He prepared at this time additions and corrections for a possible reprint of the second Scienza Nuova, and incorporated them in the final manuscript of the work; he thought for a time of printing his small work "on the Equilibrium of the Living Body" (De aequilibrio corporis animantis) composed many years earlier and now lost;[68] he still discharged some of the duties of his office, such as the speech on the marriage of the king, Charles Bourbon, in 1738. But from 1736 or 1737 his son began to assist him in his professional work, and in January 1741 he was definitely appointed to the chair on his father's resignation.[69] Vico henceforth lived among his family like an old soldier exacta militia, thinking over his past battles and conscious of having done his life's work. His good son read to him for some hours every day out of the Latin classics he had once loved and studied so well. And in this evening of his life he was at least spared the crowning agony suffered in his last years by a philosopher more fortunate than himself, Immanuel Kant; the agony of continuing and completing his system of philosophy, and wearing himself out in a fruitless struggle with thoughts that eluded his grasp and words that no longer obeyed him. Vico had said all he had to say; a great historian of his own life, he knew the moment at which Providence had finished its work in him, closed the door of thought it had so freely opened, and ordered him to lay down his pen.[70]
[66] Ibid. p. 415.
[67] Opp. vi. p. 425 (Sonnet on the marriage of Raimondo di Sangro, 1735).
[68] Bibl. vich. pp. 38-9.
[69] Gentile, II Figlio di G. B. Vico, pp. 30-48.
[70] The documents and the scattered notes used in this lecture and quoted from the contents of my Bibliografia vichiana are now all collected in my edition of the Autobiografia, carteggio e poesie varie: cf. the present vol. infra, p. 308.