given. My object has been to omit nothing essential. There is much in Comenius that is fanciful, and even fantastic, and of this I have endeavoured, in suitable places, to give enough to exhibit the author's manner of thought. There is much, again, that is now universally accepted in education, which I have yet preserved, because the statement of it is essential to a proper exposition of Comenius's system. My aim has been to omit nothing that is characteristic or useful, or historically important. The scholastic habit of division and subdivision was inherited by Comenius, and along with this he had in great force the systematising impulse of the German mind, though not himself a German. He can leave nothing to be understood, but will sometimes imperil his whole theory by insisting on the small as well as the great. While following closely the argument of Comenius I have dropped superfluous divisions and distinctions, but wholly to avoid repetition was impracticable.1 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBUrgh. March, 1884. S. S. LAURIE. A pleasing and lucid sketch of Comenius and his work will be found in Quick's Educational Biographies. INTRODUCTION. THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS. Ir is usual to date the revival of letters from the time of Petrarch in Italy (1304-74) and Chaucer in England (1328-1400), and to find the chief impulse which the movement received from without, in the dispersal of Greek scholars over Europe at the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The new birth of the mind of Western and Northern Europe was a process similar to that which is repeated in the intellectual history of every man who rises above those forms and conventionalities of life and opinion in the midst of which he has grown up. The intelligence of men was overlaid with a burden of pedantry of form and dogmatism in theology, ritual, philosophy, grammar, and rhetoric. Looking straight at things-things of sense and of thought,-contemplating those questions which every thoughtful man has ultimately to answer for himself, in an immediate way, and no longer through the medium of mere phrases and forms, constituted the essence of the revival. The regeneration of the human spirit was felt in almost every department of intellectual and moral activity. It is a mistake however to think A that there was any sudden breach of the continuity of European life in the Revival. There had been an awakening on the subject of education in the time of Charlemagne and the University movement of the twelfth century had familiarised men's minds to the re-discussion of old problems. Ancient Greek learning had also for some time been influencing the leaders of thought through the Latin translations from the Arabic. This return of the soul of man to Reality-the attempt to penetrate to the truth of things through the hardened crust of verbalism and dogma was, it seems to me, the true characteristic of the revival. For the dry bones of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, was now substituted the living substance of thought, and the intellectual gymnastic of the schools gave place to the free play of mind once more striving to bring itself into contact with nature. The revival was thus a return to realism—the realism, that is to say, of the thought of man exercised directly on the things that pertain to humanity. The classical writers of Greece and Rome were, in those days, almost the sole exponents of the new life, and the alliance in them of truth and felicity of perception with beauty of expression so captivated the minds of the learned men of all civilized countries that they surrendered to them their own individuality. Beauty of expression was regarded as inseparable from truth and elevation of thought. The movement soon shared the fate of all enthusiasms. The new form was worshipped as the old had been, and to it the spirit and substance were subordinated. Style became |