Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/71

 In 1643, George Rakoczy, Count of Transylvania, had asked him to accept the professorship formerly held by Alsted, and at the same time to undertake a general reform of the school system in Hungary. Count Radziwill of Lithuania had gone further, and had actually proposed to give him a residence on his estate and endow him with the quarter of his income that he might carry on his Pansophic studies in peace. Both these suggestions Comenius had rejected, and he therefore felt that, while practically fulfilling his promise, he was not called upon to become an utter slave to de Geer’s desire for school-books.

De Geer, however, did not see matters in the same light, and, on his return from Orla to Elbing, Comenius found himself compelled to write a dutiful letter to Hotton, each line of which shows that the chains that bound him to philology were galling his flesh. “O that it had pleased God,” he writes, “to instil these thoughts into another, to implant these intellectual desires in another’s mind! O that I might have either greater powers or fewer desires! But with every forward step that I make, a further insight is granted me, and I find it impossible not to strive after what is deeper and better. The consequence is that my former work always seems imperfect, and though I correct and improve in a thousand ways and without intermission, I arrive at no definite result. The task that I have undertaken is a great one, and my efforts are like a stream whose volume of water increases as it gets farther from its source. You see that I have something in my mind greater than a Vestibulum, a Janua, a Dictionary, or leading-strings for boys of that description.”

But neither this letter nor one of a later date received any answer, and Comenius wrote again (November 1644) imploring de Geer, in God’s name, not to desert him, since he had refused help from other quarters. In proof of this he copied several passages from Count Radziwill’s letter and sent them to Hotton, that de Geer might see if he had really been guilty of inconstancy. He must at this time have been in serious pecuniary distress, only slightly