written in an inflated style; the Croats, who are of the same race and use the same language as the Serbs, have the chronicle of the Anonymus Presbyter Diocleus, as he is called, who lived about the middle of the twelfth century.

I mention the laws of the Serbian tsar Stephen Dushan of the fourteenth century, only to call momentary attention to the interesting Slavonic legal codes, which have been preserved. A similar document is the Russkaya Pravda of Yaroslav of the eleventh century.

But although little of the early Serbo-Croatian written literature has come down to us, we must not forget the fine collection of ballads first published by Vuk Stephanović and subsequently by Pogoljub Petranović Ristić and others. On their appearance in print, the civilised world was fairly astonished at this revelation of Slavonic song, of which people had had but slight knowledge previously, although glimpses of it had been given by the Abbé Fortis and others. It would be impossible on the present occasion to give anything like an adequate account of the treasures contained in these ballads; but the cycle dealing with the Battle of Kosovo, and the fate of the unfortunate tsar Lazar, will probably prove most attractive to the majority of readers.

I shall hope on subsequent occasions to return to this delightful subject, for songs are the great inheritance of the Slavonic people. No nations abound more in literature of this kind. Wherever there is a Slavonic woman, there is a song, said Schafarik, and the remark is a true one.

Nothing is, indeed, more striking than the grace, beauty, and naiveté of the Russian popular songs. The more one reads them the more surprised one feels at their delicacy and at the absence of all coarseness and vulgarity, and that too among a people where peasant life has to be lived upon such a hard and sad level. Yet if we take the commonest Russian song-book, as for example one published at Moscow in 1854, we come upon charming collections, wedding songs, songs sung to

accompany a dance, and many others. The Malo-Russians, the inhabitants of the southern country, have a very rich collection. Professor Bodenstedt, the translator of Pushkin and other Russian poets, who has admirably rendered many of the Malo-Russian songs into German, pronounces the following opinion upon them:

'In no country has the tree of popular poetry borne such lordly fruit, nowhere has the spirit of the people exhibited itself in so vigorous and truthful a way as among the Malo-Russians. What a charming air of sadness, what deep true human feeling do those songs express, which the Cossack sings while absent in a foreign country! What tenderness and manly strength breathe throughout his love-songs!' It seems to me that one of the Russian minor poets has beautifully expressed the feeling of hope and self-confidence which the patriot ought to feel as he listens to the peasant singing at his work::

More boldly those songs of half-sadness are flowing,
And full of a strength that is young:

They tell of a soul that triumphant is growing,
Though through years it was tortured and wrung.

Maybe thou hast bowed, native land, 'neath thy sorrow,
And harsh was thy fortune to bide;

But nay-I'll believe not that freedom's glad morrow
And her songs to these fields are denied.'

Of the Ragusan school of poetry, an offshoot of the Italian, but using the native language, something also must be said at a fitting season.

If we turn to the Bulgarians, whose splendid outburst into national life after the cruel bondage of centuries is one of the wonders of the age, we find that their early chronicles-at least those which have come down to us, for a great deal of their literature has been destroyed by the Turks and Greeks are merely translations from Byzantine originals. These are works which have their philological value, but

no special importance as Bulgarian. The Bulgarians, however, have fine collections of popular songs and ballads, many of which are of great beauty and pathos. The first great collection of them was published in 1861 by the brothers Miladinov at Agram, at the expense of the patriotic Bishop Strossmayer. These two unfortunate men, on the most trivial of charges, were secretly strangled in a Turkish prison. Dozon, a French consul, published another collection, and there has also appeared a volume of Macedonian ballads, edited by Verković. The last of these writers has since injured his reputation by the publication of what he called the Veda Slovena, a volume of songs professedly gathered together in the Balkan mountains and furnishing specimens which went back as far as the time. of Orpheus. But it was the appearance of another Macpherson with another Ossian!

As a specimen of the Bulgarian ballad, let us take a few lines from one in M. Dozon's collection, which I give in a strictly literal translation; the original reminds one of some of the best Klephtic ballads :

Liben, the young hero cried out
On the suminit of the mountain.
Liben bade adieu to the forest.

To the forest and fountain he spake:

Oh wood, oh green wood,

And oh cool spring,

Dost thou know forest, dost thou remember

How often I have wandered over thee?

Have led my young heroes,

Have carried my red standard?

The forest never spake to anyone,

And yet it spake to Liben.

Liben, thou hero Liben,

Enough hast thou wandered over me,

Hast led thy chosen youths,

Hast carried thy red standard,

On the summit, on the mountain

By the cool thick shade of the trees

By the dewy green grass.

*

Till this time, Voivode Liben,
The old mountain was thy mother,
The green forest was thy bride,
With tufted foliage adorned;
Refreshed with the sweet breeze.

The grass gave thee a bed,

Thou wert covered by the forest-leaves;
The clear waters gave thee drink;

The forest-birds sang to thee.

*

To judge by the matter accumulated in such works as the Collection of Ballads of the brothers Miladinov and the Bulgarski Slovnik of Cholakov, there is a great field of folk-lore and folk-song to be investigated among this interesting people. Their language had almost disappeared for centuries from the knowledge of the civilised world. The Turk was devouring them body and soul. When Schafarik, about sixty-five years ago, wrote his epoch-making' History of the Slavonic Languages and Literature,' so little was known about the Bulgarian language that he actually treated it as a dialect of Serbian. The Bulgarians were really discovered by a Malo-Russian, named Venelin or Hutsa, who sixty years ago travelled among them and interpreted them to the rest of Europe. He may be said to have awakened the self-consciousness of this cruelly oppressed people. He lit the torch which has never ceased to burn. But there was no grammar of the language till 1852, when the brothers Tsankov published one at Vienna: in Latin letters, however, and as it seems to me with a very confused system of orthography. Still one had to be thankful for small mercies. We can see by their preface that they feel they are addressing a public which has confused notions on the subject of Bulgarian grammar. Hoffentlich wird man nicht länger mehr Meinungen und Behauptungen hören müssen, welche die bulgarische Sprache für ein skythisches, tatarisches, und Gott weiss was noch für ein anderes Idiom. ausgaben.'

It would be impossible to discuss on the present occasion the

interesting question how far the modern Bulgarian language resembles the Old Church language-Palaeo-slavonic as it seems to me it should best be called, because that name commits the philologist to no theory-but certainly Bulgarian exhibits a very curious form of Slavonic in the postposition of the article, the loss of the cases, except in the dialects and popular songs, where we find them still and also in the preservation of the nasals in some of the dialects. The existence of the latter in Palaeo-slavonic was discovered by the Russian scholar Vostokov, and a further light is thrown upon them by Slavonic words, which have entered Magyar and Roumanian. Thus, to take a single example, the Russian verb gliadiét, to see, represents a nasal in the first vowel now lost, and the root is therefore glend, as Miklosich correctly shows us in his 'Etymological Dictionary.' We have a proof of this in the Roumanian word for looking-glass, oglinda. Besides the Bulgarian dialects nasals are found in Polish and also in Kashubish, the strange dialect of Polish, spoken near Danzig, which has been partly investigated by philologists.

The younger and less important literatures of the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Slovenes have not such names to show us, but here and there a writer of charming lyrics has appeared, as Preradović and Radičević among the Serbs, and Vasov among the Bulgarians.

The valuable literary and scientific reviews and journals. appearing in Russia and Poland must be here mentioned. Students of natural history, anthropology, ethnology, chemistry and mathematics are now anxious to learn Russian and Polish to be able to read the Transactions of their learned Societies. Eminent scientific men in England have frequently expressed to me their sense of the importance of these publications. The Polish Academy and the University of Cracow are issuing a series of valuable papers; we have also the Biblioteka Warszawska (Warsaw Library) published in that city, and the Prace Filologiczne or Philological Studies, a review of first