n the two latter countries, however, the
language was retained, and the occidental church service conducted in
the Slavic language; i.e. in a language which at that time was
perfectly intelligible to the Illyrians.

It appears that the priests of this part of the country had never
adopted the alphabet, which Cyril invented for the benefit of their
brethren in Pannonia or Bulgaria;[15] who, less advanced in
civilization than the tribes bordering on Italy, could as yet neither
write nor read; while the latter were already in possession of an
alphabet of an ancient and mysterious origin. For the first appearance
of the Glagolitic letters, (_glagol_ signifies in Slavic _word_, or
rather _verb_,) is still buried in perfect darkness. An almost
fabulous antiquity has been ascribed to this alphabet by various old
writers. According to some it was derived from the Goths or Getae;
according to others, from the Phrygians and Thracians; and a very
common tradition made St. Jerome, who was a native of Dalmatia, the
inventor of it. The sounder criticism of our age seems at last to have
proved that all these opinions were untenable. The oldest Glagolitic
manuscript known before 1830 was a Psalter of A.D. 1220; i.e. more
than three and a half centuries younger than the Cyrillic alphabet,
and evidently copied from a known manuscript written in this latter.
This, in connection with some other circumstances, induced the learned
Dobrovsky to declare the whole alphabet to be the result of a pious
fraud. It seems surprising that this view should have been generally
adopted,--at least for a certain time. It was explained by Dobrovsky
in the following way.

At a Synod held at Spalatro in Dalmatia, in A.D. 1060, Methodius,
notwithstanding he had been patronized by several popes, was declared
a heretic, nearly two hundred years after his death; and it was
resolved that henceforth no mass should be read except in the Latin or
Greek language. From the decrees of that Synod, it appears that they
took the Gothic and Slavonic for the same idiom. A great part of the
inhabitants of Illyria remained nevertheless faithful to their
language, and to a worship familiar to their minds through that
language. A singular means, Dobrovsky asserts, was found by some of
the shrewder priests, to reconcile their inclinations with the jealous
despotism of Rome. A new alphabet was invented, or rather the Cyrillic
letters were altered and transformed in such a way, a