historian Nestor it appears, that the Proverbs of Solomon existed in the twelfth century in Slavic.  The book of Wisdom, Ecclesiastes, the Prophets, and Job, were translated in Servia in the thirteenth or fourteenth century; the Pentateuch in Russia or Poland A.D. 1400, or about that time.  It is certain, that towards the close of the fifteenth century, the whole Bible was already translated into Old Slavic.  According to Dobrovsky, the different parts of it were not collected until after A.D. 1488, when the Bohemian Bible of Prague was printed.  This latter served as a model for the arrangement of the Slavonic Bible; what was wanting was at that time supplied, and those books of the Old Testament which had been translated from the Greek, were reviewed and corrected according to the Vulgate.  The Codex of Moscow of A.D. 1499, the most ancient existing copy of the whole Bible in the Old Slavic, is probably at the same time the first which was ever wholly completed.

The domains of the Old Slavic language, which seemed at first to be of very great extent, were soon, by the well known jealousy of the Romish church, limited to Russia and Servia.  In Bohemia, which owed its conversion to German priests, the Slavic liturgy seems never to have been generally introduced; and the old Slavic church language has therefore exerted only an inconsiderable influence on the Bohemian.  In Poland too, the Slavic liturgy was only tolerated, although the first books with Cyrillic types were printed there.  In Moravia, Pannonia, and Illyria, the Slavonic worship was, after some struggle, supplanted by the Latin; in 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.