In 1686 Petrus Francius, professor at the Illustrious School of Amsterdam, in an oration entitled De usu et praestantia linguae Graecae, delivered a warning against the dominance of French culture and, in a passage which has attracted the attention of Dutch historians, referred to the danger that spiritual annexation by France might bring in its wake political subjection to France. The warning, though it came somewhat ironically from a doctor of Angers, articulated the fears of the embattled Latinists of the Netherlands of whom Francius was one that the advance of French culture was being made at the expense of Latin, and of the classical, humanist tradition in general. If, as has been asserted, the particular enemy that Francius had in mind was Cartesianism, then his attack had come too late, because Cartesianism had sunk too deep into the basic assumptions of Dutch intellectual life, and was too widely dispersed, to be rooted out. Nevertheless, there was a sense in which an attack on French cultural dominance, which enlisted as its ally fears of a French imperium, could not have come more appropriately than in 1686, and in which, far from having been over-taken by events, Francius displayed a fine sense of timing, indeed, a remarkable prescience. I refer of course to the fact that in 1686 the Dutch Republic was experiencing a massive infusion of French influences. The Huguenot exodus from France, consequent upon the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in the previous year, seems to have reached its first and greatest peak in 1686, judging at least from the establishment