ns, have induced the author to recast
the work; and to lay it anew before the public, corrected, enlarged,
and continued to the present time; as a brief contribution to our
knowledge of the intellectual character and condition of those
nations, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In its present shape, the work may be said to supply, in a certain
degree, a deficiency in English literature. It is true, that
the literature of the Russians, Poles, Bohemians, and some
others, is treated of under the appropriate heads in the
_Encyclopaedia Americana_, in articles translated from the German
_Conversations-Lexicon_, though not in their latest form. The Foreign
Quarterly Review also contains articles of value on the like topics,
scattered throughout its volumes. Dr. Bowring, in the prefaces to some
of his Specimens of Slavic Poetry, has given short notices of a
similar kind. The Biblical literature of the Old Slavic and Russian
has been well exhibited by Dr. Henderson[1]; while an outline of
Russian literature in general is presented in the work of Otto[2].
Valuable information respecting the South-western Slavi is contained
in the recent work of Sir J.G. Wilkinson.[3] But beyond this meagre
enumeration, the English reader will find few sources of information
at his command upon these topics. All these, too, are only sketches of
separate _parts_ of one great whole; of which in its full extent, both
as a whole and in the intimate relation of its parts, no general view
is known to exist in the English language.

Yet the subject in itself is not without a high interest and
importance; relating, as it does, to the languages and literature of a
population amounting to nearly or quite seventy millions, or more than
three times as great as that of the United States. These topics
embrace, of course, the history of mental cultivation among the Slavic
nations from its earliest dawn; their intellectual development; the
progress of man among them as a thinking, sentient, social being,
acting and acted upon in his various relations to other minds. They
relate, indeed, to the history of intellectual culture in one of its
largest geographical and ethnological divisions.

In this connection it is a matter of no small interest, to mark the
influence which Christianity has exercised upon the language and
literature of these various nations. It is to the introduction and
progress of Christianity, that they owe their written language; and