Within the domain of science, this humble man of the people became an aristocrat: and the "lordly style"[23] which he falsely ascribed to the wretched writings of the proud nobles and pompous prelates of his day was in reality his own. He loathed the polite and social literature which was gradually spreading in France and Italy and other European countries, the "ladies' books."[24] But he avoided no less that other class of treatise which we nowadays call "handbooks," which explain in detail elementary definitions and facts ascertained by others; books useless except to the young.[25] Vico, who suffered quite enough from the young within the circle of his school, saw no need to sacrifice to them any part of his own inviolable life of science. The public towards which he looked was not composed of boys, lords and ladies. When he wrote, his first practical thought was, "what would a Plato, a Varro or a Quintus Mucius Scaevola think of the fruits of his thought?" and secondly, "what will posterity think?"[26] Among his contemporaries he looked only at the republic of letters, the brotherhood of scholars, the Academies of Europe: a public which did not require him to repeat what had been already discovered and stated in the course of the history of science, and was perfectly familiar to him, but only demanded the exposition of such thoughts as constituted a real advance of knowledge: not voluminous works, but "little books, all full of original things."[27] His public was an ideal one, which sometimes in his simplicity he confused with the actual professional scholars and the critics of literary reviews: and the mistake often caused him surprise. Short books on metaphysical subjects seemed to him to have a peculiar power, as in fact they have; he compares them very justly with religious meditations "which briefly set forth a small number of points" and are more valuable for the development of the Christian spirit than "the most eloquent and lucid sermons of the most gifted preachers."[28] This love of brevity inspires his refusal to burden with many books the republic of letters, which, he says, is already sinking beneath the weight. He left his discourses unpublished, only printed his _De ratione_ out of a sense of duty, and often expressed a desire that the _Scienza Nuova_ alone should survive him, as the work which summed up in itself the concentrated and perfected fruits of all his earlier efforts.