found to answer, and as the inaugurator of a period of national prosperity. So far at least we have no cause to blush for our founder. But as our founder, I think we may look at him more closely. The house of Brunswick has always had the reputation for the good sense to patronise literature, and especially historical literature, Not to seek for precedents so far back as Henry the Lion, who superintended the writing of the annals of his country in the twelfth century, it will perhaps suffice to give a general reference to the enormous number of historical books which, during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, issued under ducal patronage from the presses of Helmstadt, Hanover, and Gottingen. George himself had been the patron of Leibnitz, of Jo. George Eccard, Burckhard Goyhilf Struve, and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, whom I name rather as familiar to English ears than as standing alone in their peculiar studies. One of his first measures, when his accession to the crown of Great Britain had increased his influence in Europe, was to interest himself in behalf of Leibnitz and Muratori in their attempts to draw, from the archives of the jealous republic of Venice, materials for their gigantic undertakings in the same line. At Cambridge, again, he appears as purchasing and bestowing on the University the invaluable MS. Collections of Bishop More, which have helped to make the Public Library there one of the most useful and famous historical libraries in Europe. Whatever may have been the king's purpose in these several measures, we may safely, I think, affirm that it was not a mere political or official object which determined him when, in 1724, he wished to confer a mark of favour on Cambridge and to hold out an olive-branch to Oxford, to give to his sister foundations the same character of professorships of Modern History. Leibnitz was the most learned man he had ever seen, and perhaps Leibnitz's learning was most intelligible to George I in the shape of the