For, as is well known, his financial state was always of the gloomiest. The son of a small Neapolitan bookseller, he was at first compelled to go as a private tutor to a wild town of the Cilento; later, returning to Naples, he tried in vain to obtain the position of secretary of the city, and having in 1699 been elected to the chair of rhetoric, he held that position for thirty-six years at an annual stipend of a hundred ducats (_£17_). His attempt to pass to a chair of greater importance in 1723 failed, whether owing to ill-luck or to inability--he recognised that he was a "man of little spirit in matters of utility,"[17]--he was compelled to give up hopes of academic advancement. He was therefore obliged to eke out his resources by literary work such as we have mentioned, and still more by private lessons; he not only kept school at his own house as well as at the university, but he went up and down other men's steps to teach grammar to youths or even to children. His family fife was not a happy one. His wife was illiterate, and had not the qualities with which her sex sometimes compensates the defect; she was incapable of any domestic employment whatever, so that her husband had to take her place. Of his children, one girl died after a long illness and the heavy expenses which embitter the diseases of the poor; one boy showed such strong vicious tendencies that the father was compelled to seek the intervention of the police and place him in a house of correction. So sublimely irrational was his fatherly affection that upon this occasion when he saw from the window the police officers he had called in, coming to take his miserable and beloved son away, he ran to him crying, "my son, flee!"[18]