[66] Very interesting are the “immeasurable labours and intellectual efforts” of Master Samuel Hartlib, whom Milton addresses as “a person sent hither by some good providence from a far country, to be the occasion and incitement of great good to this island.” (Of Education, A.D. 1644.) See Masson’s Life of Milton, vol. iii; also biographical and bibliographical account of Hartlib by H. Dircks, 1865. Hartlib’s mother was English. His father, when driven out of Poland by triumph of the Jesuits, settled at Elbing, where there was an English “Company of Merchants” with John Dury for their chaplain. Hartlib came to England not later than 1628, and devoted himself to the furtherance of a variety of schemes for the public good. He was one of those rare beings who labour to promote the schemes of others as if they were their own. He could, as he says, “contribute but little” himself, but “being carried forth to watch for the opportunities of provoking others, who can do more, to improve their talents, I have found experimentally that my endeavours have not been without effect.” (Quoted by Dircks, p. 66.) The philosophy of Bacon seemed to have introduced an age of boundless improvement; and men like Comenius, Hartlib, Petty, and Dury, caught the first unchecked enthusiasm. “There is scarce one day,” so Hartlib wrote to Robert Boyle, “and one hour of the day or night, being brim full with all manner of objects of the most public and universal nature, but my soul is crying out ‘Phosphore redde diem! Quid gaudia nostra moraris? Phosphore redde diem!’”
But in this world Hartlib looked in vain for the day. The income of £300 a year allowed him by Parliament was £700 in arrears at the Restoration, and he had then nothing to hope. His last years were attended by much physical suffering and by extreme poverty. He died as Evelyn thought at Oxford in 1662, but this is uncertain.
[67] Dilucidatio, Hartlib’s trans., p. 65.
[68] The Dilucidation, as he calls it, is added. All the books above mentioned are in the Library of the British Museum under Komensky.
[69] Masson’s Milton, vol. iii, p. 224, Prof. Masson is quoting Opera Didactica, tom. ii, Introd.
[70] Unum Necessarium, quoted by Raumer.
Compare George Eliot: “By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are part of the Divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”—Middlemarch, bk. iv, p. 308 of first edition.
[71] Compare Mulcaster, [supra, p. 94].
[72] Comenius here follows Ratke, who, as I have mentioned above (p. 116), required beginners to study the translation before the original.
[73] Professor Masson (Life of Milton, vol. iii, p. 205, note) gives us the following from chap. ix (cols. 42-44), of the Didactica Magna:—