for the Janua, with appended annotations for the use of teachers a very clear, complete, and yet brief work compared with the Grammars of the time; and a LatinGerman Lexicon, published later, in 1656, at Frankfort, and not included in the collected works, as being too cumbrous. A more advanced school-book, entitled Atrium Linguae Latinae, he had just begun when he was called into Hungary, where it was completed. The imperfections of these books, as indeed of all his writings, he is always ready to admit, pleading that no one man could all at once correct the mistakes of the past, place education on a right basis, and furnish the school with proper instruments of teaching.

While still engaged in the completion of the works which belong to this Elbing period, when he was subsidised by De Geer, he received many testimonies from men high in position as to the value of his labours. An interesting correspondence with the Palatine of Posnania, Christoph. Opalinski de Bnin,' himself an author and a vigorous promoter of education in his own country, was lost in the destruction of Lesna by the Swedish army, in 1655, under Charles x. -an invasion which destroyed also the gymnasium at Sirakovia, which Opalinski had founded and supplied with translations of Comenius's school-books.1

The products of the six years of Elbing industry he dedicated to De Geer.

1

Having discharged his obligations to his Swedish

1 Judicia, novaeque disquisitiones.—Vol. ii. of Works, p. 458.

friends in the department of Didactics, he was about now, at last, to apply himself exclusively to the greater Pansophic schemes, and was contemplating future labours in this direction with much complacency when he received a letter from the Prince Sigismund Racocus,1 and his widowed mother, the Princess of Transylvania, urging him to advise in the reformation of the schools in their country. The requests of mother and son were enforced by communications from theologians, and were favourably entertained by him because of the kindness shown in Transylvania to exiled Moravians. Accordingly, in May 1650, he betook himself to SarosPatak, a market-town of Hungary, on the Bodrogh, and thence, along with their Highnesses, to Tokay, twenty miles to the north-east. It was in this year that he published his Lux in Tenebris, a book on the fulfilment of modern prophecy, and became entangled with one Drabicius,2 who gave himself out as a prophet and gained a certain following. This weakness in Comenius may be touched with a gentle hand. His theological writings show that he had strong mystical leanings, and in later life he was a devoted admirer of Madame Bourignon, to whom, indeed, he stood in personal relations.

The form which his scholastic labours now took com1 George I., Ragotzski, Prince of Transylvania. This country was not incorporated in the Austrian dominions till 1699. Hungary accrued to Austria in 1526, and became hereditary in 1687.

2 For an account of Drabicius and Kotterus, see Bayle's Dictionary. Their productions were largely embodied in Comenius's book. The date of the publication of Lux in Tenebris is given variously. This is doubtless due to the confounding of the Czech and Latin editions.

D

bined the Didactic with the Pansophic more fully than hitherto. Being asked to put his idea of a Pansophic school in writing, he printed his Illustris Scholae Patakinae Idea, and thereafter in full detail his Scholae Pansophicae classibus septem adornandae Delineatio. During his residence at Patak, which lasted till 1654, he produced fifteen works, among which were the new editions of the Vestibulum and Janua, the first edition of the Atrium, the famous Orbis Pictus (World Illustrated),1 and the Schola Ludus.

These text-books are described in the account of Comenius's educational views which follows this sketch of his life and labours. The most characteristic and important of the works of this period was the Schola Pansophica, or Universalis Sapientiae Officina, an account of which will also be found in its proper place. He desired to make the new Patak seminary not merely a Pansophic school, but also to give it the character of a Latin state, nay, even of Latium itself. Nothing but Latin was to be spoken.2 This was practicable, because he contemplated a college in which all the pupils should dwell together.

His patrons did all they could to fulfil their promises of support. They gave him a collegiate building, and, in addition to this, they purchased the fourth house from the college for the school. Comenius's plan was to buy up the intervening houses, with their gardens, and as many on the other side, so as to provide resi

1 Printed at Nüremberg in 1658.

2 Deliberatio de Latio a Tiberi ad Brodrocum transferendo.

dences for seven masters, and also seven class-rooms. The whole was to be surrounded by a continuous wall, so that a little Latin state (Latina civitatula) might be planted, with its own open areas and gardens—all enclosed from the outer world. This was to be a little republic, having its own customs, laws, judges, and senate, and its own chapel and services. The masters were to preside over a large family like fathers, and there, in a course of seven years, beginning at the age of twelve, boys were to be instructed in 'all things that perfect human nature,' and trained to be pious Christians and wise and cultivated men.

The three-class school which formed the lower division of this Pansophic seminary was organised with a view to instruction in Latin along with Real things. The higher classes, up to the seventh, are described elsewhere. They do not seem ever to have been organised.

The Precepts of Manners, collected for the use of youth in 1653, are amusing, and at the same time afford evidence of the exaggerated conceptions which Comenius entertained of the possibilities of education. He believed, in truth, that he could manufacture a man. These also were written for the Patak school.

The Schola Ludus, which is a kind of dramatic Janua Linguarum et Rerum, was likewise written and printed for the Patak school. An elaborate Latino-latin Lexicon was also composed during the four years' residence at Patak. Comenius left it behind him in MS., and it was afterwards printed at Amsterdam in 1657.

The Prince Sigismund, unfortunately, died prema

turely, and those in authority after his death resolved. to limit the new institution to the three-class Latin, or philological, school, and for the use of this school the Vestibulum, Janua, and Atrium were printed in LatinHungarian. The Patak school was auspiciously opened under three carefully selected masters, and Comenius believed it to be flourishing in 1657, when, at Amsterdam, he was writing his dedicatory epistle prefixed to the Schola Ludus. It had, however, suffered from the plague of 1655, which temporarily broke it up. Having accomplished his work of organisation and book-writing, Comenius left Hungary in 1654, pronouncing his valedictory address on June 2d of that year, in presence of a distinguished assembly.1

In that address he informs his audience that his objects in school reform were-to give compendiums for learning the Latin tongue, which would make the acquisition of it pleasant; to introduce a higher and better philosophy into school work, so as to fit youth for the investigation of the causes of things; and to create a higher tone of morals and manners. To carry out these objects, he had constructed, he tells them, a Vestibulum and a Janua of the Latin tongue for the first two classes, with their accompanying lexicons and grammars, and an Atrium for the third stage, with a more extended grammar, including idioms, phrases, and elegancies, and a Latino-latin lexicon. As to science, arts, philosophy, morals, and theology, he had so con

1 Laborum Scholasticorum Patakini obitorum Coroniso, vide vol. iii. p. 1041.