each time stress should be laid on some fresh point. By the ninth reading it should practically be known off by heart. Great stress is laid on the importance of employing the morning hours for learning, and the afternoon for reading and writing. Similarly, the Janua is to be read ten times, the tenth reading being a kind of Latin disputation in which the winner gets a prize.[1]
In the following year (1638) an invitation came from Sweden asking Comenius to undertake the reformation of the schools in that country. He refused. The task, he said, was too great for one man, and he foresaw nothing but envious opposition from the local schoolmasters.
But, though not induced to leave Lissa, it was brought home to him how much schools all over Europe were in need of reformation, and he was induced to commence the translation of The Great Didactic out of Czech into Latin. The headings of the chapters he communicated to Hartlib, who published them in 1642 as an appendix to his Reforme of Schooles. In other directions his literary output was as great as ever. To these years belong two plays, Diogenes Cynicus redivivus and Abrahamus Patriarcha, which were acted by the students of the Gymnasium.
To the interest excited by his philosophic schemes we have alluded in our account of the Prodromus. This interest continued to increase, and Comenius, who had come to Lissa in 1628, known merely as a member of a little band of Bohemian exiles, with sensible views on the teaching Latin, began to realise that he had achieved European notoriety and that any country would be glad to secure his services. Much his renown was probably due to the enthusiasm of Hartlib, who was in correspondence with a large number of intellectual men both in England and on the continent. Pell, an English mathematician and the friend of Hartlib, was in communication with Mersenne in France; Mersenne had written to Comenius on the subject of his Pansophic schemes, and Descartes himself, an old school-fellow and friend of
- ↑ Op. Did. Omn. i. 348–393.
