devoted to a thorough grounding in morality and religion. This again had been frequently urged, though not so weightily or so systematically. But when we come to the introduction of “real studies,” the rudiments of which are to be taught in the nursery, and when his views on this subject gradually merge into “Pansophia” or “Universal Knowledge,” we feel that a really new element has been introduced. This element, however, contains nothing subversive. Nothing could be further removed from the method of Rousseau. Comenius starts with no fundamental condemnation of society. No brilliant paradoxes fill his pages. His reform is to be a gradual development of what already exists, and, that his suggestions may be practicable and may pave the way for a transition with as little friction as possible, he bases them on the writings of his predecessors. With some of these he was not familiar. As we shall see, in our general view of the educational systems of the age, there were writers of whom he had not heard; but, be that as it may, he had done all in his power to analyse the tendencies actually at work, and his Didactic is an endeavour to embody all that was good in existing schemes, while adding many features that were new.
From the first day of his residence in Lissa, Comenius never ceased to work at his comprehensive treatise The Great Didactic. Written in Czech, and probably completed in 1632, it remained in manuscript till 1849, when it was printed at Prague. A Latin translation, however, with several additional chapters, was published at Amsterdam in 1657, and occupies the first ninety-eight pages of the Opera Didactica Omnia.
Even before his final departure from Bohemia, Comenius had probably sketched out his educational scheme, in which he provides for the education of a child from the very hour of its birth. Six years in what he calls the Mother School, six years in the Vernacular School, and six years in the Latin School enable a young man to proceed to the University at eighteen, having had a training, though necessarily a somewhat superficial one, in every
