Envy, insincerity, gossip, calumny and stupidity provoked violent outbursts of anger on Vico's part. He confesses this fault in his autobiography where he says that he inveighed in too severe a manner against the errors of conception or doctrine or the incivility of his literary rivals, when in Christian charity and as a true philosopher he ought to have ignored or pardoned them.[52] But as a matter of fact this fault did not greatly distress him: he thought it rather an ornament. The funeral speech for Angela Cimini contained a kind of hymn to anger, the "heroic wrath which in noble spirits disturbs and shakes to the depths by its boiling all those evil thoughts of the mind, which beget the vile swarm of fraud, deceit and falsehood, and renders the hero frank, truthful and loyal; and thus making him a partisan of truth, arms him as the valiant knight of reason to do battle with wrong and offence."[53] Although in his writings he guards "with all his power" against falling into this passion[54] we feel a scarcely repressed torrent of wrath in his private letters whenever he denounces the "miserable pedants" who "love learning more than truth," or the common tendency of man to be "all memory and imagination," and so forth. In conversation also, it seems, he could be very violent. When in 1736 Damiano Romano published a work controverting his theory of the Twelve Tables, Vico, although according to Romano himself he had been spoken of as "most learned" and "most famous," together with other titles of respect, "tore the book to pieces with his teeth in a way that made every one present tremble with horror," rinding a sign of the deepest malignity in the fact that "a lad like myself should join issue with him."[55] But his outbursts of wrath were succeeded by fits of the deepest dejection. In a sonnet he speaks of himself as over-whelmed by that fate "which the unjust hate of others often creates," and says that for this reason he has separated himself from human society to live with himself alone. Sometimes he shakes off this torpor for a moment: then, he says: I draw within myself again, and pressed By heavy cares, return to where I stood:[56] My fate and not my fault I do lament. [Footnote 42: Published by me in _Napoli nobilis,_ xiii. (1904), f. 1., and again in _Secondo suppl. alla Bibl. vich._ pp. 70-2.] [Footnote 43: _Opp._ vi. p. 17.] [Footnote 44: _Bibl. vich._ pp. 103-5.] [Footnote 45: _Opp._ vi. p. 145.] [Footnote 46: _Ibid._ p. 110.] [Footnote 47: _Opusc.,_ ed. Villarosa, ii. p. 277.] [Footnote 48: _Bibl. vich._ p. 105.] [Footnote 49: "I praise Vico." Letter published by me in _Bibl. vich._ p. 107.] [Footnote 50: _Bibl. vich._ pp. 87-8.] [Footnote 51: _Ibid._ p. 44.] [Footnote 52: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 416: cf. the evidence of a pupil in _Bibl. vich._ p. 89.] [Footnote 53: _Opp._ vi. p. 254.] [Footnote 54: _Autob._ in _Opp._ iv. p. 416.] [Footnote 55: _Bibl. vich._ p. 88.]