retreat at Elbing, once more took up his residence at Lissa. De Geer and Hartlib were both anxious that he should leave the books to be published by Elzevir in Amsterdam, but he thought it better to see them printed under his own eyes, and insisted on entrusting them to a local printer at Lissa. He was now settling for the second time in the town where his spurs as a schoolmaster and as an educationist had been won, and many things combined to make him enter on this new stage of his career with that melancholy to which the Slavonic temperament is ever prone. He was fifty-six years old. His life had been spent in exile and in the continual struggle against poverty. His hopes that the Evangelic religion would ultimately prosper must, by this time, have been a good deal shaken. The Pansophia was not completed, and, at his age, with his duties, and in a century when the duration of life was much shorter than at the present day, he could scarcely hope to finish it. True, he had produced his school-books, his Great Didactic, and his Treatise on language, but these were to him nothing but spinosa didactica. His life-work, the work for which he had wished to be remembered, existed but in his own fancy and in the loose sheets of uncoördinated information that he had been collecting for years. In addition, the death of his wife, for whose weak state of health the journey to Lissa had proved too much, made him more than ever in need of the sympathy that, as a Bishop, he was expected to extend to others.
To leave the author for a moment, and return to his writings. The printer at Lissa proved unsatisfactory, and, in 1650, Comenius sent the manuscripts to Amsterdam, washed his hands of them, and left their publication to de Geer. The works written between 1642 and 1650 constitute the second part of the Opera Didactica Omnia. Here we find the Methodus Linguarum Novissima, a couple of pages of the Vestibulum, in Latin and in German, and the same amount of the Janua, both left unfinished because, as he tells us,[1] he brought out an improved edition later on, in
- ↑ Op. Did. Omn. ii. 297.
