Long after the whole region was perfectly Germanized, a few towns in the eastern corner of the present kingdom of Hanover, were still almost exclusively inhabited by a people of Slavic race, who in the seventeenth century, and even to the middle of the eighteenth, had preserved in some measure their language and habits.  But, since the Germans were strongly prejudiced against the Vendish name,—­the nations of this race, especially those in the western part of the German territories, being despised as subjugated tribes, and inferior in general knowledge and information,—­they gradually renounced their national peculiarities.  Towards the close of the seventeenth century, when Hennings, German pastor at Wustrow, took great pains to collect among them historical notices and a vocabulary of their language, he found the youth already ignorant of the latter, and the old people almost ashamed of knowing it, or at least afraid of being laughed at by their children.  They took his inquiries, and those of other intelligent persons, in respect to their ancient language and usages, as intended to ridicule them, and denied at first any knowledge of those matters.  We find, however, that preaching in the Vendish language of this region was still continued for some time later.  Divine service was held in it for the last time at Wustrow, in the year 1751.  According to the vocabularies which Hennings and a few others collected, their dialect, like that spoken in Lower Lusatia, was nearly related to the Polish language; partaking however in some peculiarities of the Bohemian, and not without some of its own.[1]

The second great Vendish tribe, the Wiltzi or Pomeranians (Germ. Wilzen), also called Veletabae, were, as we said above, subjugated in A.D. 782 by the Obotrites; and the country between the Oder and the Vistula formed for more than a hundred and fifty years a part of the great Vendish kingdom.  They regained, however, even before the final dissolution of this latter in A.D. 1026, the partial independence of their own dukes; who attached themselves to Germany, and afterwards, under the name of the dukes of Pomerania, became princes of the empire.  In the year 1124 the first Pomeranians were baptized by Otho, bishop of Bamberg; and the place where this act was performed, Ottosbrunnen (Otho’s Well), which five hundred years ago was encircled by four lime-trees, is still shown to the traveller.  As they received religion and instruction from Germany, the influence of the German language can easily be accounted for.  German colonists aided in spreading it throughout the whole country.  The last person who understood the old Pomeranian language, is said to have died in the year 1404.  No trace of it remains, excepting only the names of places and persons, the Slavic origin of which can be recognized throughout all north-eastern Germany by the terminations in its, enz, ik, or ow.  In A.D. 1637 the line of the old Pomeranian dukes expired, and the country