Mersenne, had expressed his approval of them, though hitherto he knew of them only by hearsay.[1]
Comenius thus began to feel that the walls of the Lissa Gymnasium formed a limited horizon, and one beyond which his personal influence might with great advantage be extended. Many causes worked together to make him dissatisfied with his position. The death of Count Raphael in 1636 and of his old master Alsted in 1638 had taken from him two of his best friends. Enemies, envious of his success, had worked upon the distrust that his brothers in the faith could not refrain from evincing towards his scientific efforts, and had accused him before the Synod of displaying irreverence in his Pansophic writings. Count Bohuslaw had seceded from the Evangelic party and embraced the Catholic faith, and seems to have given an unsatisfactory reply when Comenius (in 1640) laid before him his further schemes for scholastic and pansophic works. It is therefore not surprising that he yielded to the pressing demands of Hartlib and, having first obtained leave from the Unity, set out for England.
It was after a most unsatisfactory voyage, during which he had been carried by a storm into the Baltic, that he reached London in the September of 1641; but, once there, he was received with open arms by the little band of which Hartlib was the centre.
A man of great enthusiasm but of less judgment, Hartlib knew everybody in England who was worth knowing. “I could fill whole sheets,” he wrote to Worthington,[2] “in what love and reputation I have lived these thirty years in England; being familiarly acquainted with
- ↑ De modo autem speculum ejusmodi conficiendi, naturæ maxime consentaneus ille videtur (quem et Comenium hac de re libros mundi utriusque Majoris nimirum et Minoris cum libro Scripturæ, ut audio, potissimum consulentem sibi eligere conjicio) qui Vestigia Creatoris in producendis rebus accuratissime observet, ita ut ex rationis lumine primo probetur; necessario concedendum esse rerum conditorem et Deum, deinde Creaturæ eo pertractentur modo, quo Moses eas in Genesi sua procreatas luculenter descripsit.—Excerpta Literarum, J. Duræi, 1638. MS. Sloane, Brit. Mus. 417.
- ↑ Dr. John Worthington, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge.
