Presently the King of Naples gave him yet two more posts--entailing not only emoluments but work--and he resumed his literary labours, wrote a pamphlet on the ‘Instincts and Habitual Tastes of Man,’ a comic opera, to Paisiello’s music, called ‘The Imaginary Socrates,’ and another most amusing pamphlet, written in a single night, to distract the Neapolitans from their fright on the eruption of Vesuvius in 1779. In 1781 he visited Rome, and was courted by all the great people; and when he came home Naples gave him another rich abbey and another most lucrative civil appointment. He was still a comparatively young man. Fortune had overturned her horn at his feet. ‘The torment of all things accomplished, the plague of nought to desire,’ might well have been Galiani’s. But he had the rare power of finding happiness where it most often hides--in small and common things. The monkey which had amused his leisure he had replaced by a couple of cats, and it afforded him infinite amusement to watch their gambols and their habits, and write long dissertations on the natural history of the animal to Madame d’Épinay in Paris. His friendship with her had lasted without break or blot for nearly five-and-twenty years. If happiness meant only exemption from suffering, then well for Galiani that no woman ever held his heart more nearly than this light, bright, irresponsible little person. But that side of existence which brings the deepest sorrow brings too the highest joy, and who is spared the first, misses the second. Madame Daubinière had touched neither his soul nor his life; Madame d’Épinay only aroused a capacity for a friendship which, as he loved no one, had certainly assumed some of the absorption of a passion. When she died in 1783, he stood in the presence of a great and a most genuine sorrow. She had represented the Paris he would see no more; to answer her letters had been a large occupation in his life--and she was dead! He turned to his work as his last hope, to the one means that was left of making life endurable. In 1785 he was attacked by apoplexy, and two years later he travelled for his health. But it was not improved. ‘The dead are so bored,’ he said in his old jesting manner; ‘they have asked me to come and cheer them a little.’