dant.[7]

Be this as it may, the Old Slavic has long since become the common
property of all the Slavic nations, and its treasures are for all of
them an inexhaustible mine. Dobrovsky counted in it 1605 radical
syllables.[8] Hence, it is not only rich in its present state, but has
in itself the inestimable power of augmenting its richness, the
faculty of creating new forms of expression for new ideas. But its
great perfection does not consist alone in this multiplicity of words.
Schloezer, the great historian and linguist, justly observes: "Among
all modern languages the Slavonic (Old Slavic) is one of those which
are most fully developed. With its richness and other perfections I
have here no concern. How it became so, the history of its cultivation
sufficiently explains. Its model was the Greek language, in those days
the most cultivated in the world; although Cedrenus no longer wrote
like Xenophon. No idiom was more capable than the Slavonic of adopting
the beauties of the Greek. The translators, intending a literal
version, and not like Caedmon the Anglo-Saxon, or Otfried the German, a
mere _poetic metaphrase_, were in a certain measure compelled to
_subdue_ their own language, to make it flexible, to invent new turns,
in order faithfully to imitate the original." [9]

After having ceased for centuries to be a language of common life, the
Old Slavic has of course lost that kind of pliancy and facility, which
only a living language, employed to express all the daily wants of
men, can possibly acquire. But for this same reason it has gained
infinitely in solemnity and dignity. Imposing by its very sound,
exciting in the minds of millions sanctifying religious associations,
it seems to have grown almost unfit for any vulgar use, and to have
become exclusively devoted to holy, or at least to serious and
dignified subjects.

There are, as we have mentioned above, many circumstances, which seem
to justify the opinion, that the Slavi were very early in possession
of a degree of cultivation, which would make it indeed difficult to
believe, that they should not have known how to read and write before
the ninth century. Ditmar of Merseburg, the German, speaks of the
inscriptions with which the pagan Obotrites, the Slavic inhabitants of
Mecklenburg, used to cover their idols. The southern Slavi had much
greater advantages. Neighbours of the Greeks, and in constant
intercourse with them; both as a nation, by war and traffic,