s not admitted, he had the right to take lodgings in
his village wherever he pleased; and did he lose any thing, not his
host, but the proprietor who had refused to harbour him, was bound to
remunerate the loss.[5]

The monks of this and the following centuries must have written a
great deal; as is proved by the many manuscripts that still lie
accumulated in the numerous Servian and Macedonian monasteries,--the
mere remnant of those which perished in the long tempests of bloody
wars and desolating conflagrations. About fifty years after the
invention of printing, some of the church books from time to time were
published in Servia and Syrmia. The earliest Servian print extant is
from the year 1493, viz. an Octateuch, published at Zenta in
Herzegovina. In Russia they did not begin to print until sixty years
later. In 1552 the Gospels were printed in Belgrade; in 1562 another
edition in Negromont. But these faint signs of life soon became
extinct; and we hear no longer of the least trace of literature among
the Servians of the Turkish empire. Among the Austrian Servians also,
literature seems to have been equally dead; with the exception of a
History of Servia, written and left in manuscript by George
Brankovitch, the last despot of that country, towards the close of the
seventeenth century. A genealogical work published by Dshefarovitch at
Vienna in 1742, had to be engraved, for the want of proper types. In
the year 1755, under the reign of Maria Theresa, when some attention
began to be paid to the schools of her Illyrian provinces, the
archbishop of Carlovitz was compelled to have Smotrisky's Grammar[6]
printed in Walachia, because no Slavic types were to be found in the
whole Austrian empire. Some years afterwards, A.D. 1758, a private
Slavic press was founded at Venice. In Austria, Cyrillic-Slavonic
books could not be printed earlier than A.D. 1771, when a printing
office was established at Vienna; the monopoly of which for all
Slavo-Servian scientific works throughout the empire, was given to the
university of Buda. From this one point, therefore, the whole literary
cultivation of the Servians of the oriental church in the Austrian
empire, could alone proceed.[7]

After the partial revival of Servian literature in 1758, a
considerable number of works were composed; and there are among them
not a few, which, notwithstanding the mixed and unsettled idiom in
which they are written, attest the general capacity of the na