years after its close, Cardinal Mazarin, doubtless not actuated altogether by religious motives, left a legacy for carrying on a war against the Ottoman power; and, after the accession of Louis XIV, Boileau and Fenelon in letters, and others in apocalyptic prophecies, appealed in the same sense to the receptive mind of the King. In 1664, French troops, forming a contingent furnished by Louis XIV as a member of the Confederation of the Rhine, took part in Montecuculi's splendid victory at St. Gotthard on the Raab over the Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprili, and in the same year the French flag was planted at Gigeri on the Algiers coast, as a place of security against the Moslem pirates, the pest of the Mediterranean.
It is unnecessary further to illustrate the growth of an idea which took hold of Leibniz at a very early date, and which no doubt was met half-way by the fascination which the rediscovered East, whether Near or Far, always exercised over his imagination. To go no further back, towards the close of the treaties mentioned, the Securitas Publica, he had dwelt on the probability that in the future, when the scope of all expeditions of war would be remote, France, too, would find her sphere of action at a distance, and, as she had done in the days of St. Louis, would carry the arms of Christendom into the Levant and into Egypt in particular. In 1671—only a few months before Louis XIV definitely announced to the Elector of Mainz his intention of invading the United Provinces—Leibniz composed his Fabula Ludovisia, in which St. Louis is supposed to appear in a dream to his reigning namesake, and to bid him undertake an expedition to Egypt; which rather sudden proposal Louis XIV, on awaking, dutifully promises to carry out. (There is no reason for wondering at the employment by Leibniz of this or similar devices for arresting attention on so serious a subject; he made constant use of them, from dialogue and poem to epigrammatic couplet and even mild anagram; for like all born publicists may I say all born teachers—he held by
