ife in
exile at Mt. Athos, and there, in another monastery, was a pale,
sickly monk, poring over crabbed MSS. This Paissu, a Bulgar, had
entered, like his elder brother, the great Serbian monastery of
Hilendar. We know from him that while the various Orthodox monks of
Mt. Athos--Greeks, Bulgars, Russians, Serbs and Vlachs--were
frequently at loggerheads, yet the others even more frequently
combined to fall upon the Bulgars and to upbraid them because their
history had not been glorious and because they had an insufficient
number of saints. The Bulgar was nothing but a servant of the Greek;
Bulgarian was no doubt written in a monastery here and there, but as
for the spoken language, were not the townsfolk often ashamed of it?
Did they not prefer to talk Greek? "I was filled with sadness," says
Paissu, "on account of my race." There happened to be at Hilendar the
monk Obradovi['c], who was less enthusiastic about Glagolitic than
about the songs sung by the peasant. With the fundamental thought of
working for the whole people, including the women, he clung to the
idea of a literature in the popular, rather than in the old Church
language. He was to set out, in pursuit of Western science, to France
and Italy and England--he spent six months in London. The whole people
was dear to him; he looked beyond their differences of religion, their
other differences, and saw the brotherhood, in race and speech, of all
the Southern Slav countries. He was to become one of the great
inspirers of modern Serbia and her first Minister of Education.[33] He
urged young Paissu to travel among his countrymen in search of
manuscripts and legends. If only he could find the buried splendour of
his people and call it into life again. And before he died--he
suffered from continual headaches and an internal malady--he had
finished, in 1762, his book, _Slav-Bulgarian History of the Bulgarian
People and Rulers and Saints_. This naif, imperfect book, more lyric
than scientific, but sincere and impassioned, has played a part in
reminding the Bulgars of their story; it is the fountain-head of the
Bulgarian Renascence.

In Serbia the gallant Captain Kot[vc]a also tried to begin for his
country a Renascence. Russia and Austria declared war against the
Turks in 1787. The Serbian volunteers, who included Kara George,
crossed the Danube and fought with great courage. Yet the Austrians
were beaten and Kot[vc]a was captured, by treachery, in the Banat; he
was