language of the present day. It is true that Latin no longer tyrannised over the intercourse of the learned to such an extent as in the previous century. The Reformation had ousted Latin from the services of the Reformed Church. In every country the vernacular was beginning to assert itself, and the establishment of the Academia della Crusca at Florence in 1582, and of the Académie Française in 1637, showed that the instinctive movement in this direction was becoming thoroughly self-conscious.
But this modernising breeze had not yet stirred the dust on the school-room benches. Latin was still the chief subject taught, though the high estimation in which it stood was shown more by the time devoted to it than by any successful efforts to teach it rapidly and well. Attempts had been made, and many of them, to render the path of the beginner easier, and it was no longer necessary for him to sit down to the task of finding his way through Terence with no other assistance than that given by an ignorant usher; but none of these attempts had attained any genuine result, and there was still no suitable class-book from the study of which could be obtained a fairly comprehensive vocabulary and a knowledge of the structure of sentences sufficient to enable a boy to attack a classic author on his own account.
To the composition of such a class-book Comenius applied himself in 1628,[1] and the result of his efforts was the publication in 1631 of his Janua Linguarum Reserata, or Seminarium Linguarum et Scientiarum Omnium. This book, as an introduction to the study of Latin, was an immense advance on anything that had yet appeared. Its method of construction, however, was not original, as the idea had already suggested itself to two pedagogues, the one Elias Bodinus, and the other William Bateus, a member of the Jesuit College at Salamanca.
With Bodinus’ scheme Comenius had been familiar since 1627, and from it he doubtless borrowed the essential features of the Janua. Bodinus’ suggestion was as
- ↑ Op. Did. Omn. ii. 82.
