hunting up unpublished manuscripts; all this to illustrate the
history of Brunswick. Letters in great number I receive and write.
Then I have so many discoveries in mathematics, so many speculations
in philosophy, so many other literary observations, which I am
desirous of preserving, that I am often at a loss what to take hold
of first, and can fairly sympathize in that saying of Ovid, 'I am
straitened by my abundance.' [12]"

[Footnote 11: _Annals Imperii Occidents Brunsvicensis_. Leibnitz
succeeded in discovering at Modena the lost traces of that
connection between the lines of Brunswick and Esto which had been
surmised, but not proved.]

[Footnote 12: "Quam mirifice sim distractus dici non potest. Varia ex
archivis eruo, antiquas chartns inspicio, manuscripta inedita
conquiro. Ex hic lucem dare conor Brunsvicensi historiae. Magno
numero litteras et accipio et dimitto. Habeo vero tam multa nova in
mathematicis, tot cogitationes in philosophicis, tot alias
literarias observationes, quas vellem non perire, ut saepe inter
agenda anceps haeream et prope illud Ovidianum sentiam: _Iniopem me
copia facit_."]

His diplomatic services are less known at present than his literary
labors, but were not less esteemed in his own day. When Louis XIV.,
in 1688, declared war against the German Empire, on the pretence
that the Emperor was meditating an invasion of France, Leibnitz drew
up the imperial manifesto, which repelled the charge and triumphantly
exposed the hollowness of Louis's cause. Another document, prepared
by him at the solicitation, it is supposed, of several of the courts
of Europe, advocating the claims of Charles of Austria to the vacant