French prophetess and visionary, Antoinette Bourignon, who had recently come to reside at Amsterdam; but his life was burning low, and not even the fuel of fanaticism was able to revive the flame. Early in the year 1670 his son-in-law Figulus died, and, on the 15th of November, the last Bishop of the Bohemian Brethren quitted that life in which every ambition that he entertained had been doomed to disappointment. He was buried at Naarden, near Amsterdam, on the 22nd of November.
It was a strange account on which the ledger had closed. For himself, Comenius was a failure, and his life bankrupt; not so for mankind. The despised pedagogy, the “puerilia illa mihi toties nauseata” have laid posterity under an eternal obligation, and have given the deepest possible meaning to the words of Leibnitz,
“Tempus erit, quo te, Comeni, turba bonorum.
Factaque spesque tuas, vota quoque ipsa colet.”[1]
Of Comenius’ descendants little is known. His son Daniel was ordained, and died in 1694, but these two facts exhaust the material for his biography. Nor have we much more information about the fate of his literary remains. Gerard de Geer’s interest in the Pansophic writings did not cease with the death of their author, and he entrusted the arrangement and publication of the manuscripts to a certain Nigrinus, who appears to have found his task a difficult one, owing to the complex nature of the plan that Comenius had been trying to work out. In 1677 he announced that the Panorthosia was completed, but no trace of its publication remains. In 1680 he brought out a Specilegium Didacticum,[2] giving the scheme of the didactic works. If he was responsible for the Janua Rerum that appeared in 1681 it is impossible to say.
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