Vico's attitude towards social and political life resembles in more than one respect his attitude towards religion. There is in him no trace of the missionary, the propagandist, the agitator or the conspirator as there was in some of the Renaissance philosophers, notably Giordano Bruno and Campanella, whom although--perhaps because--a Neapolitan, Vico never mentions. Certainly, his age and his country were not the time or place for heroes; there was none of that rapid social change and revolution from which heroes spring. Political parties however were active in favour of Austria and France, and men were arising who devoted their labours and their lives to one or other of these parties, or were persecuted and fled into exile: and above all this was the period in which culminated the struggle between Church and State, between Naples and Rome, in the person of Pietro Giannone, a man of whom Vico never speaks, just as he never mentions and in fact seems to ignore the entire movement. Political life rolled past over his head, like the sky and its stars, and he never wasted his strength in a vain attempt to reach it. Political and social controversy, like religious, was outside the sphere of his activity. He was indeed a non-political person. We cannot describe it as a fault or a weakness, for every one has his limitations; one struggle excludes another, and one labour makes others impossible. Not that he avoided all contact with political life and its representatives. Only too often he was compelled to pay his respects to both, in the form of histories, speeches, verses and epigrams in Latin and Italian; and these alone would be sufficient material for the reconstruction of Neapolitan history in all its vicissitudes from the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth: the Spanish viceregency, the conspiracy and revolution attempted by the partisans of Austria, the reaction and re-establishment of the Spanish viceregency, the Austrian conquest, the Austrian viceregency, the Spanish reconquest and the reign of Charles Bourbon. But Vico, "very pliant because of his necessity"[8] and as professor of eloquence in the royal university, was compelled to supply the literary compositions required by the solemnities of the day, just as the draper supplied hangings and the plasterer volutes and arabesques. And what hangings and arabesques he produced! The Spanish style of the seventeenth century was still predominant in literature; and this fact is alone almost enough to explain the extravagance and ornateness, as it seems to us, of Vico's flood of panegyrics. The indifference and innocence of his own attitude may be illustrated by the passage in his autobiography where after mentioning the _Panegyricus Philippo V inscriptus_ composed by himself to the order of the Spanish viceroy, the Duke of Ascalona, he goes on as if it was a mere nothing, with no connexion but a simple