intercourse. Of greater interest is the work that follows, An Apology for the Latinity of the Janua. On his arrival in Amsterdam, Comenius had been asked by some influential citizens to open a small school, and try the efficacy of his method on the Dutch boys. This suggestion seems to have made the established schoolmasters of the town apprehensive that the stranger, with his new methods, would make a bid for their teaching connection, and thus render their position insecure. They therefore brought against him the only charge that would hold water, namely, that his scholarship was poor and likely to lead boys astray.[1] To this Comenius replied in his Apologia Latinitatis, and, anxious to leave his enemies no case against him, he followed this up by his Ventilabrum Sapientiæ,[2] in which he subjects his own method to a critical examination and points out his own shortcomings so unsparingly as to leave nothing for the ill-disposed to say.
He had now finished with the Latin school-books, “from which he had so often turned in disgust,”[3] and was free to devote himself to the Pansophia. “Mr. Comen,” writes Hartlib to Pell, “to retire himself to give himself wholly to his Pansophia goes this spring to be at Monsieur de Gerre’s house for a certain time, where he is provided for as a prince, but nobody knows he is there but we three and one of Comen’s amanuenses.”[4] It would have been well had de Geer’s sympathy stopped short at the Pansophia. Unfortunately he took quite as much interest in the Revelations and in the cognate doctrine of Chiliasmus, or the one thousand years’ reign of peace on earth to be inaugurated by Christ at His second coming, and even invited Drabik to come to Amsterdam.[5] The year 1656, so fateful to the Unity, had been foretold as that in which
- ↑ Op. Did. Omn. iv. 6.
- ↑ ‘Ventilabrum Sapientiæ sive sapienter sua retractandi ars. Cum adjuncta authoris omnium Didacticarum suarum cogitationum retractatione brevi.’
- ↑ Latinitatis studia mihi toties nauseata.—Op. Did. Omn. iv. 6.
- ↑ Hartlib to Pell, quoting a letter of Rulice, Vaughan, ii. 448.
- ↑ Ibid.
