comfort; they preferred Venice and Paris—the former in those days the chosen abode of luxurious pleasure—to Osnabrück and Hanover, but they did what they could to make their own courts bright and enjoyable and, in a measure, refined. But they differed in both their religious and their political opinions; John Frederick became an ardent Roman Catholic, while Ernest Augustus, like his eldest son after him, remained a staunch Lutheran, without being much affected by the freer ways of thinking which his wife had brought from her brother s court at Heidelberg. In politics, John Frederick was one of those German princes who followed the lead of Louis XIV so long as it was possible; while Ernest Augustus, with his eldest brother George William of Celle, though not so soon as he, became one of the mainstays of the Imperial and anti-French cause, influenced no doubt by the distinction gained by his sons in the Imperial service against the Turks, and by his own desire to secure for the furtherance of his dynastic ambition the goodwill of the Emperor.
That Leibniz should have served both these princes with equal zeal and devotion—for his biographical memoir of John Frederick is written in the courtliest strain of panegyric—does not seem very wonderful, more especially as his service to the elder brother was of so short duration. But it helps to account for the fact that the years following on the succession of Ernest Augustus to Hanover (from 1680 to about 1695) were, to judge from his literary activity as well as from his correspondence in them, the period of his career most congenial to himself as a politician—the aspect of his intellectual activities to which I must confine myself here. Leibniz, as he had only too much occasion for reminding the Elector George Lewis, both before and after the Elector had become King George I, was a faithful servant of the House of Hanover. None of the three chief steps towards the consummation of its greatness—the establishment of primogeniture as safeguarding the unity of the Lüneburg-Celle dominions,
