Lewis de Geer, a rich Dutch merchant and philanthropist, residing at Nordköping, Sweden, had offered to render him financial aid in working out his educational reforms in Sweden. But de Geer’s notions of reform differed widely from those of the English friends. He was less interested in universal research, the founding of pansophic colleges, and the results of original investigation than Hartlib and the Englishmen. What he wanted was better school-books for the children, rational methods of teaching for the teachers, and some intelligent grading of the schools. The English friends were satisfied with the broad generalities of pansophic learning, the unrealized dreams that were so very near the reformer’s heart; the Dutch merchant would be satisfied with nothing less than concrete applications of theories. There is no doubt that Comenius would have preferred lingering in England or going to some place where his cherished pansophic schemes might be given a hearing. But he was human and had organic needs, and he knew that the liberal remuneration offered him by de Geer would avert poverty even though the realization of his pure and exalted pansophic dream was deferred. “In the history of great renunciations,” says Mr. Keatinge,[18] “surely none is stranger than this. We have a man little past the prime of life, his brain teeming with magnificent, if somewhat visionary, plans for social reform, a mighty power in the community that shaved his religious ideas, and an object of interest even to those who may have shrugged their shoulders at his occasional want of balance. Suddenly he flings his projects to the winds, consigns his darling plans to the dustheap of unrealizable ideas, and retires to a small seaside town—not to meditate, not to give definite form to latent conceptions or to evolve new ones, not to make preparation for the dazzling of intellectual Europe with an octavo of fantastic philanthropy or of philosophic mysticism, but—to write school-books for the little boys in Swedish schools.”