to learn the same word repeatedly in the same juxtaposition would wear out the patience of the most diligent pupil. A modern writer who wished to construct a book of this kind would proceed on the assumption that a very limited number of words must be repeated as often as possible, so that each, by dint of its perpetual recurrence, may impress itself on the mind. Of the great principle of iteration Comenius was well aware; indeed he lays special stress upon it,[1] and it is therefore the more surprising that in this instance his practice runs directly contrary to his theory.
Whatever the shortcomings of the book may have been, and Comenius fully realised that it had many,[2] its success was extraordinary. No one was more surprised than the author himself at the triumphal procession that it made through Europe.[3] It was translated into twelve European languages—Latin, Greek, Bohemian, Polish, German, Swedish, Belgian, English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian, and even travelled as far eastward as Asia, where it appeared in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Mongolian. For the existence of many of these translations we have only the author’s word,[4] but it is an undoubted fact that in every European country generations of children thumbed the Janua and no other book until they were sufficiently advanced to begin Terence or Plautus, and that for years after its publication Comenius’ name was familiar in every school-room.[5] Even Bayle, who is little disposed to sympathise with Comenius, confesses that the
- ↑ Did. Mag. chap. xviii. sec. 43.
- ↑ Hic, inquam, scopus fuit, quem attigisse tantum abest ut glorier, ut primus etiam defectus agnoscam et confitear.—Op. Did. Omn. i. 254.
- ↑ Factum est, quod futurum imaginari non poteram, ut puerile istud opusculum universali quodam eruditi Orbis applausu fuerit acceptum.—Ibid. iii. 381.
- ↑ Ibid. iii. 381. Beeger says that a manuscript translation into Turkish by Ali Beg, and dating from 1650, exists in Paris.
- ↑ Evelyn’s Diary, 27th January 1658: “My deare son Richard died. He had before the fifth yeare learned out Puerilis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin and had made a considerable progress in Comenius’ Janua.”
