Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/114

 qui coûta beaucoup de veilles à son auteur, et beaucoup d’argent à d’autres et dont la République de lettres n’a tiré aucune profit; et je ne crois pas même qu’il y ait rien de practicable dans les idées de cet auteur.”

In the eighteenth century Bayle’s Dictionary was widely circulated, and ignorant readers readily acquiesced in the estimate given to Comenius’ character and merits. In 1742 a protest was raised by Paul Eugene Layritz, school-director at Nuremburg, under the title Vindication of the Memory of Comenius, but this was unable to counteract Bayle’s influence, and a still more deplorable fate awaited the unhappy pedagogue. Adelung, in his History of Human Folly, gives him a prominent place, and classes him with magicians, alchemists, and soothsayers—a truly humiliating position for the father of modern education.

To be abused tries one’s temper, but need not diminish his self-esteem; to be misunderstood may embitter a disposition, but need not shatter a sense of merit; but to be absolutely ignored presents no element of compensation, and this is what befell Comenius at the hands of his successors in the path of school reform. While the pedagogic writers of the seventeenth century were firm believers in the continuity and organic development of educational theory, those of the eighteenth to a large extent ignored the efforts of their predecessors, and were at no pains to discover if the principles that they enunciated had already been worked out by others. A. H. Francke mentions the Unum Necessarium, but never alludes to the Great Didactic. Had Rousseau been put through a course of Comenian method, his Emile might have lost in paradox and in piquancy, but the educationist would have gained, where the lover of polite literature lost. In How Gertrude