the effects of the Battle of Prag, being in the following year (1621) taken and plundered by the Spaniards. On this occasion Comenius lost his MSS. and almost everything he possessed. The year after his wife died, and then his only child. In 1624 all Protestant ministers were banished, and in 1627 a new decree extended the banishment to Protestants of every description. Comenius bore up against wave after wave of calamity with Christian courage and resignation, and his writings at this period were of great value to his fellow-sufferers. § 3. For a time he found a hiding-place in the family of a Bohemian nobleman, Baron Sadowsky, at Slaupna, in the Bohemian mountains, and in this retirement, his attention was again directed to the science of teaching. The Baron had engaged Stadius, one of the proscribed, to educate his three sons, and, at Stadius’ request, Comenius wrote “some canons of a better method,” for his use. We find him, too, endeavouring to enrich the literature of his mother-tongue, making a metrical translation of the Psalms of David, and even writing imitations of Virgil, Ovid, and Cato’s _Distichs_. In 1627, however, the persecution waxed so hot, that Comenius, with most of the Brethren, had to flee their country, never to return. On crossing the border, Comenius and the exiles who accompanied him knelt down, and prayed that God would not suffer His truth to fail out of their native land. § 4. Comenius had now, as Michelet says, lost his country and found his country, which was the world. Many of the banished, and Comenius among them, settled at the Polish town of Leszna, or, as the Germans call it, Lissa, near the Silesian frontier. Here there was an old-established school of the Brethren, in which Comenius found employment. Once more engaged in education, he earnestly set about improving the traditional methods. As he himself says,[65] “Being by God’s permission banished my country with divers others, and forced for my sustenance to apply myself to the instruction of youth, I gave my mind to the perusal of divers authors, and lighted upon many which in this age have made a beginning in reforming the method of studies, as Ratichius, Helvicus, Rhenius, Ritterus, Glaumius, Cæcilius, and who indeed should have had the first place, Joannes Valentinus Andreæ, a man of a nimble and clear brain; as also Campanella and the Lord Verulam, those famous restorers of philosophy;—by reading of whom I was raised in good hope, that at last those so many various sparks would conspire into a flame; yet observing here and there some defects and gaps as it were, I could not contain myself from attempting something that might rest upon an immovable foundation, and which, if it could be once found out, should not be subject to any ruin. Therefore, after many workings and tossings of my thoughts, by reducing everything to the immovable laws of Nature, I lighted upon my _Didactica Magna_, which shows the art of readily and