IV. LIFE AND EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF PESTALOZZI.

BY CARL VON RAUMER,

(Continued from VOL. III., p. 416.)

FOR seventeen years after the publication of Leonard and Gertrude, Pestalozzi continued to drag on his needy and depressed existence at Neuhof, where he spent altogether thirty years. Of his outward life during those seventeen years, we learn little else, besides the general fact just stated. It is worthy of mention, that in this period he entered the order of Illuminati, an order which was characterized by infidelity, exaggerated ideas of enlightenment, and destructive but not reconstructive principles, and that he even became eventually the head of the order in Switzerland. He soon discovered his mistake, however, and withdrew from it. "That which is undertaken by associations," he says, "usually falls into the hands of intriguers."

In this period he wrote several books.

In the year 1782, he published "Christopher and Alice." He himself relates the origin of this work. People had imbibed from Leonard and Gertrude the idea, that all the depravity among the common people proceeded from the subordinate functionaries in the villages. "In Christopher and Alice," says Pestalozzi, "I wished to make apparent to the educated public the connection of those causes of popular depravity which are to be found higher in the social scale, but which on this account are also more disguised and concealed, with the naked, undisguised, and unconcealed causes of it, as they are manifested in the villages in the persons of the unworthy functionaries. For this purpose, I made a peasant family read together Leonard and Gertrude, and say things about the story of that work, and the persons introduced in it, which I thought might not occur of themselves to everybody's mind."

So says Pestalozzi in the year 1826; but he spoke otherwise in the preface to the book when it first appeared, in 1782. "Reader!" he says, "this book which thou takest into thy hand is an attempt to produce a manual of instruction for the use of the universal school of humanity, the parlor. I wish it to be read in every cottage." No. 10.-VOL. IV., No. 1.]-5.