Leibniz, Sophie Charlotte’s chosen guide, philosopher and friend, is worthy of more than passing notice, since his influence over the Princess Caroline was second only to that of the Queen of Prussia herself. In Caroline’s youth, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a prominent figure at Berlin, whither he frequently journeyed from Hanover. He was one of the most learned men of his time, almost equally eminent as a philosopher, mathematician and man of affairs. He was born in 1646 at Leipzig, and after a distinguished university career at Jena and Altdorf, he entered the service of the Elector-Archbishop of Mainz, and, as he possessed the pen of a ready writer, he was employed by him to advance his schemes. The Archbishop later sent him to Paris, nominally with a scheme he had evolved for the re-conquest of Egypt, really with the hope of distracting Louis the Fourteenth’s attention from German affairs, so that Leibniz went in a dual capacity, as a diplomatist and as an author. In Paris the young philosopher became acquainted with Arnauld and Malebranche. From Paris he went to London, where he met Newton, Oldenburg and Boyle. His intimacy with these distinguished men stimulated his interest in mathematics. In 1676, when he was thirty years of age, Leibniz quitted the service of Mainz and entered that of Hanover. For the next forty years his headquarters were at Hanover, where he had charge of the archives, and worked also at politics, labouring unceasingly with his pen to promote the aggrandisement of the House of Hanover, especially to obtain for it the electoral dignity. Leibniz’s work threw him much in contact with the Electress Sophia, with whom he became a trusted and confidential friend, and whose wide views were largely coloured by his liberal philosophy. Leibniz had a positive passion for work, and in these, the most active years of his life, he not only laboured at political affairs, but worked hard at philosophy and mathematics, turning out book after book with amazing rapidity. At the suggestion of the Electress Sophia, he concerned himself with theology too, and strove at one time to promote the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant creeds, his principal correspondent being Bossuet. The English Act of Parliament, vesting the succession to the throne of England in the Electress Sophia and the heirs of her body, _being Protestant_, put a summary stop to these labours. Henceforth there was no more coquetting with Roman Catholicism at Hanover. The Electress Sophia, Calvinist though she was, affected to manifest an interest in the Church of England, and especially favoured the English Protestant Nonconformists.