Though he was a churchman of prominence, being the last Bishop of the Unity, his reputation is founded not on his ecclesiastical and philosophical writings, but on his pedagogical studies. As a school reformer he was the first to carry out the principle, long since recognized as sound by all teachers, of appealing to the senses; so he called the artist to his aid. The result was the _Orbis Sensualium Pictus_ or the _Visible World_. “The circumstances of his life were as unfavorable as possible to his career as a writer,” remarks Lützow. “Traveling from Moravia to Bohemia, thence to Poland, Germany, England, Sweden, Hungary, Holland, ever unable to obtain tranquillity, often in financial difficulties, twice deprived of his library by fire, forced to write school-books, when he was planning metaphysical works that he believed to be of the greatest value, he always undauntedly continued his vast literary undertakings.” From Cotton Mather[9] we learn (a fact which is confirmed by other sources) that Governor Winthrop offered to Komenský the Presidency of Harvard College. “That brave old man Johannes Amos Comenius, the fame of whose worth hath been Trumpetted as far as more than Three Languages (Whereof everyone is endebted unto his Janua) could carry it, was agreed withal by our Mr. Winthrop, in his travels through the Low Countries, to come over into New England and Illuminate this Colledge and Country in the Quality of President: But the Solicitations of the Swedish ambassador, diverting him another way, that Incomparable Moravian became not an American.” [9] _Magnalia Christi Americana_; or, _The Ecclesiastical History of New England_. Book IX., p. 128. Biographers are not agreed as to the number of Komenský’s works. F. J. Zoubek has enumerated 137 of them; Keatinge lists 127. Some were written in Latin, others in Bohemian, though Komenský, having received his theological training in Germany, was conversant with the language of that country also. As a master of Bohemian diction he had few, if any, peers. To the revivalists Komenský’s writings were a safe and never-failing storehouse of philologic material and even today, despite the circumstance that Bohemian syntax and orthography like the English, have undergone an essential change, his style is a source of delight to literary purists. His chief writings that have been translated into English, and the main facts of their publication, are as follows: _The Gate of Tongues Unlocked_ first appeared in Latin in Leszno (Lissa), Poland, in 1631; the same year in German. The Bohemian edition is dated 1633, the English 1633. _The School of Infancy._ This manual was written primarily for the use of Bohemian schools, but when the author realized that he could not return to his fatherland, being a Protestant, the work was translated into German. The English edition is dated 1641. The Bohemian manuscript was discovered only in 1856 and put into print two years later.