Bikov and Prokhor Suvorov, as I find in the entrance book.
I have since discovered that the latter was president of the
Russian Historical Society at the beginning of this century.

English connexions with Poland are scanty. A palatine of Sieradz was entertained in England in the time of Elizabeth and visited Oxford, where he saw a play acted. The arrival of the Polish ambassador Paul Dzialinski, whose name is Latinised into Jalinus, sent by Sigismund III to her court, is well known. He was a man of stately presence and appeared in a fine suit of black velvet: on being presented to the Queen he made a long oration in Latin, complaining of the wars between the English and Spaniards, whereby he asserted that the commerce of Poland was seriously injured. In reply Elizabeth reprimanded him in excellent Latin, in which as Speed says, 'lion-like rising, she daunted the malapert orator no less with her stately port and majestical deporture than with the tartness of her princely checks.'

Kochanowski, a Polish poet of the sixteenth century, still held in great esteem among his countrymen, says that the time will come when the Englishman will read his poems. Perhaps it has not come yet, but let us hope. I ought not to pass over the [eminent Polish reformer John Laski or a Lasko, as he is sometimes called, who was much in our country in the sixteenth century.

As regards Bohemia, the connexion with England has several times been close since the fourteenth century when Peter Payne, a former principal of St. Edmund Hall, carried over to that country the doctrines of Wicliffe, which led to the great religious movement among that people. The burning of Huss at Constance and the wars of the terrible Žižka are well known. The name of Wicliffe is of frequent occurrence in Bohemian religious songs still preserved. Mr. Wratislaw fortunately discovered at Cambridge one of the most valuable manuscripts of the chronicle of Dalimil of the fourteenth century.

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Wealthy Bohemians occasionally visited England, among others, Slavata, the hero of the defenestration, as it is called, in 1618. The winter-king Frederick and his marriage with Elizabeth, the daughter of James I, are well known. After the battle of the White Mountain in 1620 the Bohemian nation is for a time obscured, but it has revived in our own days in a wonderful manner. About this subject I hope to speak more at length in a future lecture. With the Serbs and Bulgarians England has had but little to do.

Upwards of sixty years ago, Dr., afterwards Sir John, Bowring published a series of translations from Russian, Polish, Serbian, and Bohemian. They did not effect much in the way of popularising among us the literatures of those countries. Unfortunately there is a want of colour in all these versions and a great sameness. In many instances one finds that the translator has mistaken the meaning of the original or translated through a German medium. This was decidedly the case with the versions of the Serbian folk-songs. Of these a German translation had previously appeared at Halle by a learned lady, Fräulein Theresia von Jacob, who wrote under the nom de guerre of Talvj, and afterwards married Professor Edward Robinson, the American theologian. In the charming little sketch of Slavonic literature which this lady published at New York in 1850, she alludes to the use which Dr. Bowring had made of her German version.

In 1849 and 1852 Mr. Wratislaw published some excellent translations of Bohemian poems, and also in 1878 the lectures which he delivered on the Ilchester foundation on the literature of the Chekhs in the fourteenth century. One of the first mentioned volumes contains versions of the notorious Kralodvorsky Rukopis, or Queen's Court Manuscripts, but owing to the suspicion of spuriousness under which these poems labour, we cannot greet them with a welcome. The shades gathering round them seem to grow darker, and Hanka, who affected to have discovered them, has been almost con

victed of forgery. Mr. W. R. Ralston, whose death last year must be ever lamented by Slavonic students, published two valuable works among others on Russian folk-tales and folk-songs. These well-written books have done a great deal to make English readers acquainted with the treasures of this kind possessed by Russia. Of all my late friend's work it may be said that it is done in honest and scholarly fashion: he was a man of sound knowledge and generous heart.

Polish literature, with the exception of Bowring's poor versions, has been almost entirely neglected among us. We must add the translation of the Konrad Wallenrod of Mickiewicz by a Mr. Cattley some years ago, and versions of the same poem and the Pan Tadeusz of that author by Miss Biggs. The work by this lady is scrupulously accurate, but unfortunately she has deserted the metre of the original, a fatal error as I cannot help thinking. For the rhyming lines of Mickiewicz she has adopted a rather halting style of blank verse, and blank verse is a metre which is intolerable, unless it be effectively handled. It is not every day that we shall find a Milton or a Tennyson. Here and there in stray volumes I have come upon translations of some of the spirited lyrics of Mickiewicz. As, for instance, in a work entitled the 'Polish Exile' published in Edinburgh in 1833, there is a vigorous version of the ode called Faris written on the enthusiast Wenceslaus Rzewuski, who passed his life among the Arabs in the desert and obtained the name Emir Tadj-oul-Fekher, or the Emir of the Crown of Glory. What was the fate of this eccentric man is not known: he figured in the revolutionary war of 1830, when he fitted out a squadron of cavalry at his own expense, but afterwards disappeared. According to some, he was found slain after the battle of Daszow; another and a pleasing tradition is that he escaped to the desert, where he spent the remainder of his days.

In 1881 was published at Chicago in America, a work

entitled Poets and Poetry' of Poland, edited by Paul Soboleski. The book is however of a rather disappointing character. It consists for the most part of a reprint of the translations of Bowring, with a few others; some of the versions having evidently been composed by the editor, who appears to be imperfectly acquainted with the English language. On many grounds a new translation of the masterpieces of Mickiewicz is required, and it is probably owing to this cause and the difficulty of the language in which they are written, that this poet, who has considerable merits, is so little known among us. Pushkin, however, the Russian poet has fared even worse.

The South-Slavonic languages have been seldom brought to the notice of Englishmen, almost the only exception being the interesting works published by Mr. Arthur J. Evans, who has visited both Serbia and Bulgaria and is well acquainted with South-Slavonic languages. He is the author of a valuable book of travels in Bosnia and the Herzegovina at the time of the war; he has issued a volume of Illyrian letters and also published Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum.' The Slavonic races have no more staunch friend among us.

Some years back our libraries were very poor in Slavonic books, but now that of the Taylor Institution boasts of a fairly good collection, which includes the chief classics in the literature of each and some dictionaries of a high character, such as Dahl's Tolkovii Slovar, or Explanatory Dictionary, a valuable work, full of information; weak only in one point, the etymologies, and indeed this deficiency cannot be wondered at, when we see how recently our own language has been scientifically treated. At the present day we are witnesses of the gigantic labours and learning which are being expended on the great English Dictionary undertaken by the Clarendon Press.

We have at the Taylor the Polish Lexicon of Linde and

the Cech or Bohemian of Jungmann. All appliances are at hand for a scientific study of the Slavonic languages. The Bodleian Library, through the care of Dr. Neubauer, who among other departments has superintended the Slavonic, has greatly increased its Slavonic books and is more on a level with other learned libraries.

Leaving then this first division of my subject in which I have attempted to discuss what has been done in England in the fields of Slavonic study-very scanty at best-I come to my second division, viz., the use of the Slavonic languages. In plain English, what profit can be derived taking the word in its widest sense from the study of them?

I shall divide this part of my lecture into three heads :— (a) The importance of the Slavonic languages for the study of Comparative Philology.

(b) What literature they possess worthy of our attention, and the treatment of this wide subject must necessarily be brief on the present occasion, seeing how scanty are the limits. I can allow myself.

(e) Their practical use for diplomacy and other purposes, based upon the consideration of the great number of people who speak them, and other reasons. This third part of my subject may be considered the practical one in the strictest sense of the term.

(a) Ever since the appearance of the great work of Bopp in 1835, which, as is well known, laid the foundation of Comparative Philology, the importance of the Slavonic branch in the study of the Aryan languages has been fully recognised. Only a short time before, Joseph Dobrowsky, the Nestor of Slavonic philology, had published in 1822 his Institutiones Linguae Slavicae Dialecti Veteris, the first work to put Slavonic philology upon a scientific basis. Up to that time and indeed for some time afterwards-so long is error dying the wildest theories had prevailed about the

Slavs and their languages. For example, Professor Dan