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Updated: May 28, 2025
Samuel Hartlib published a work entitled "Virginia Discovery of Silk Wormes, with their Benefits," in which he endeavored to show that the raising of silk was a thing very practicable in Virginia, and even asserted that as a staple, it might be made superior to tobacco, in which opinion he was confirmed by the judgment of several others.
Twice married before to Polish ladies, this merchant had married, in Prussia, for his third wife, the daughter of a wealthy English merchant of Dantzic; and thus our Hartlib, their son, though Prussian-born and with Polish connexions, could reckon himself half-English.
Urged more and more pressingly, Milton complied; and the result was the appearance, on June 5, 1644, on some booksellers' counters, of a thin little quarto tract, of eight pages in rather small type, with no author's name, and no title-page at all, but simply this heading atop of the text on the first page, "OF EDUCATION: TO MASTER SAMUEL HARTLIB." The publication had been duly registered, and the publisher was the same Thomas Underhill, of Wood Street, who had published Milton's first three Anti-Episcopal pamphlets.
But, indeed, nothing of a hopeful kind, with novelty in it, came amiss to Hartlib. He, as well as Comenius, had read Lord Bacon. He was a devoted admirer of the Baconian philosophy, and had imbibed, I think, more deeply than most of Bacon's own countrymen, the very spirit and mood of that philosophy.
You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlib. The least part of what is expected from him, is to be done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempera fandi.
Whether there had been any prior personal acquaintance between Hartlib and Comenius, by reason of their German and Slavic connexions, I cannot say.
"The improving a kingdom in matter of husbandry is better than conquering a new kingdom," says old Samuel Hartlib, Milton's friend, in his Legacie. It is a curious fact that as the Romans derived agricultural wisdom from their ancient enemies, so did the English. Cf. Thorold Rogers' Six Centuries of Work and Wages. "We owe the improvements in English agriculture to Holland.
Comenius had as the champion of his views in England Samuel Hartlib, a Dantziger by origin, settled in London since 1628. Hartlib had even less of real science than Comenius, but he was equally possessed by the Baconian ideal of a new heaven and a new earth of knowledge. Not himself a discoverer in any branch, he was unceasingly occupied in communicating the discoveries and inventions of others.
If Hartlib, the fellow-countryman and friend of Haak, was not an original member, he knew of the meetings from the first; and the Invisible College of his imagination seems to have been that enlarged future association of all earnest spirits for the prosecution of real and fruitful knowledge of which this club might be the symbol and promise.
Hartlib, he recommends that boys should be instructed in the Italian pronunciation of vowel sounds, in order to give sonorousness and dignity to elocution. This slight indication supplies us with a key to the method of melodious structure employed by Milton in his blank verse.
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