Jeremy Collier’s rendering into English of the Pansophiae, or, as the translator entitled it, Patterne of Universall Knowledge, is dated, London, 1651. Published in 1643, in Danzig, it was printed two years later in Amsterdam. The Bohemian translation is quite recent, dating from 1879. “No one can impartially claim for Komenský a high rank as a philosopher,” comments Count Lützow, “and it is certainly a mistake to speak of Komenský’s system of philosophy. There is no philosophical system of Komenský in the sense that there exists a philosophical system of Spinoza.”
The Physicae or Naturall Philosophie Reformed by Divine Light was printed in Leipsic in 1633, in Amsterdam 1643, 1645, 1663, etc. The Bohemian translation is recent. The English edition, in this catalogue, is of 1651.
The True and Readie Way to Learne the Latine Tongue appeared in Leszno, 1633. It was translated later into Dutch, English (our catalogue’s London edition is of 1654), Magyar, Swedish and Polish. The Latin-Bohemian-German edition is dated Trenčín, Hungary, 1649.
Komenský’s most popular book, the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, was printed originally in Nuremberg, in 1658. The English translation by Charles Hoole followed one year later. The Latin-German-Magyar-Bohemian edition was issued in 1685; the first American edition, a reprint from Hoole’s twelfth London edition, in New York, in 1810.
That the English translation of The Great Didactic, which Komenský wrote between 1627-1632 in the Bohemian language and in 1640 in Latin (published in Amsterdam, 1657), was not undertaken until our time (1896) is a matter of great surprise. The same comment is pertinent to Komenský’s most readable little volume, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, which strikingly reminds one of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It was only in 1905 that it found an able translator in the person of Count Lützow. The Praxis Pietatis, an oft-quoted book which passed through several editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has not been translated for the very good reason that it, in itself, was an adaptation, from the Practice of Piety, a volume by an English divine.
The Exhortation of the Churches of Bohemia to the Church of England, Englished by Joshua Tymarchus and printed for Thomas Parkhurst, in Cheapside, 1661, was used eighty-seven years later as an argument and a plea by a distinguished English American, Gen. Oglethorpe.
Addressing the English Parliament (1748) in favor of the passage of a bill to relieve the United Brethren, or Moravians, from military duty and oaths, General Oglethorpe explained that the “Brethren were received in England under King Edward the Sixth, and countenanced under his successors.... And to speak a few words of their further intercourse with the Church of England. Their Bishop, Comenius, presented the history of his church to King Charles the Second, in the year 1660, with a moving account of their sufferings, addressed to the Church of England.... In the year 1683, a most pathetic account of these Brethren was published by order of Archbishop Sancroft and Bishop Compton. They also addressed the Church of England, in the year 1715, being reduced to a very low ebb in Poland; and his late Majesty, George I., by the recommendation of the late Archbishop Wake, gave orders in Council for the relief of these reformed episcopal churches, and Letters Patent for their support were issued soon after.”
The prognostications made in Revelation Revealed by two Apocalyptical Treatises, is a book which relates to prophecies and alleged visions by Christopher Kotter, Christina Poniatovia and an unscrupulous impostor, Nichols Drabík by name. Genuinely believing in the truth of the prophecies of this trio, Komenský was ridiculed and criticized by contemporaries, especially by the Frenchman, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. Hallam’s belittling appraisal of the author of Orbis Sensualium Pictus (“this author, a man of much industry, some ingenuity, and a little judgment, made himself a temporary reputation by his Orbis Sensualium Pictus, etc.”) is no doubt traceable to Bayle’s unfavorable estimate. Bayle’s writings, be it remarked, were held in high regard by men of letters of his time.
In 1892 educators the world over observed the three hundredth anniversary of Komenský’s birth. The March (1892) number of the Educational Review was wholly devoted to him; it contained articles by the editor, Nicholas Murray Butler (now President of Columbia University), S. S. Laurie, C. W. Bardeen, Paul H. Hanus. The American Bohemians in several cities, Chicago, New York, Omaha, Milwaukee and Cleveland, by appropriate ceremonies also celebrated the anniversary of the birth of their distinguished fellow-countryman.