The number of the monuments of the Old Slavic increases considerably in the second period; and we find ourselves the more obliged to be satisfied with mentioning only the most important among them.  At the head of these, stands the Laurentian Codex, the oldest existing copy of Nestor’s Annals, A.D. 1377, now in the imperial library at St. Petersburg.  Nestor, a monk in a convent near Kief, born A.D. 1096, was the father of Russian history.  He wrote Annals in the Old Slavic language, which form the basis of Slavic history, and are not without importance for the whole history of the middle ages.  They were first printed in A.D. 1767, and subsequently in four editions, the last in 1796.  Schloezer, the great German historian, who published them anew in 1802-9, with a translation, added considerably to their intrinsic value by a critical and historical commentary upon them.  But even his edition could not satisfy the more critical spirit of our days.  A new one has been published in the course of the last seven years; for which, not less than fifty-three manuscripts were carefully compared.  The merit of it belongs to the Archaeographical Commission of the Academy.

The third period begins with the sixteenth century.  In the course of time, and after passing through the hands of so many ignorant copyists, the holy books had of course undergone a change; nay, were in some parts grown unintelligible.  The necessity of a revision was therefore very strongly felt.  In A.D. 1512, the Patriarch of Constantinople, at the request of the Tzar Basilius Ivanovitch, sent a learned Greek (a monk of Mount Athos) to Moscow, to revise the church books, and to correct them according to the Greek originals.  As this person some years afterwards fell into disgrace and could not accomplish the work, it was taken up repeatedly in the course of the same and the following century, until the revision of the liturgical books was pronounced to be finished in A.D. 1667; but that of the Bible not before A.D. 1751.  The principles on which this revision, or, as it was called, Improvement, was made, were in direct conflict with the reverence due to the genius of the Slavic language.  The revisers, in their unphilosophical mode of proceeding, tried only to imitate the Greek original, and to assimilate the grammatical part of the language, as much as possible, to the Russian of their own times.  They all acted in the conviction, that the language of the Bible and liturgical books was merely obsolete Russian.  Even the latest revisers of the Bible, in 1751, knew nothing of Cyril or Methodius; and had no doubt, that the first translation was made in Russia under Vladimir the Great, A.D. 988, in the language which was then spoken.

Such other works in Old Slavic, as were the productions of this period, seem rather to belong to the history of the Russian and Servian literature.  We have seen from the preceding, that the Old Slavic had altered considerably; nay, was in a certain measure amalgamated with those dialects.  We shall see in the sequel, how it was gradually supplanted by them.[22]