rose on either side. By a very clever show of yielding, the little
Republic had for a time disarmed the Turks, and, later on, when the
Venetians declared that all the commercial treaties existing between
the Dalmatian towns and Turkey were void, it was necessary for
Dubrovnik also to accommodate herself to this enactment and to
restrict her trade to Spain and the African coast. It would under
these circumstances be most imprudent, so urged some of the citizens
of Dubrovnik, if they were officiously to advertise their relationship
to the hapless Slavs, who were enslaved to the Republic's mighty
neighbours. And in 1472 the Senate had directed that within its walls
no speeches should henceforth be made in Slav. But as the Senate
consisted of forty-five nobles, and these were obliged to be over
forty years of age, one may say that they did not represent what was
most virile in the State; at all events, this isolated tribute to
expediency may for a time have been observed in that assemblage, in
the world of letters it was disregarded. And this is the more
wonderful when we remember that Dubrovnik had from Italy a language
that was already formed, she had Italian models and printers and even
their literary taste. But [vS]i[vs]ko Men[vc]etic and D[vz]ore
Dr[vz]i['c]--both of them nobles, by the way--started at once to write
verses in Slav; not very sublime verses, as they were principally
love-songs of the school that imitated Petrarch, but it is pleasing to
recall that they were written in spite of the thunders of Elias
Crijevi['c], a contemporary renegade. Under the name of Elias di Cerva
this gentleman travelled to Rome, where he made himself a disciple of
Pomponius Laetus and once more modified his good Slav name into AElius
Lampridius Cerva, and received at the Quirinal Academy the crown of
Latin poetry. Having thus qualified himself to be a schoolmaster, he
went back to Dubrovnik and settled down to that profession. He was
likewise very active as a publicist on the "barbaric" Slav language,
which, as he was never tired of screaming, was a menace both to Latin
and Italian. One is apt to call those persons reasonable, among other
things, whose opinions coincide with one's own; but is there anybody
willing to assert that because the Slav culture of that epoch was,
like many another culture, inferior to the Italian; because the
Italian towns were in the rays of artistic glory, whereas the Slav
world was not; because on that