Under the present head, besides the Servians proper, of whom great numbers have emigrated in early times to Hungary, are also strictly comprised the Bosnians, the greater portion of the inhabitants of Herzegovina, the Montenegrins or Czernogortzi, and the Slavonians of the Greek Church.  These all use the same language and alphabet; but the four latter have no distinct literature, except some collections of popular poetry.

The literature of the eastern Servians, the result of their intellectual life as a nation, does not yet date back a hundred years; nay, if regarded from another point of view, it is not yet forty years old.  Up to that time, all the Servians belonging to the Greek Church, notwithstanding the honourable example of Russia to the contrary, had written in the Old or Church Slavonic; or, in more modern times, in a language mixed up from this latter and several other dialects.  Schaffarik remarks, that out of about 400 Servian books printed between the years 1742, or more properly 1761, and 1826, about one eighth part are written in Old Slavic; another eighth in the common dialect of the people; while all the rest vary between these two in innumerable shades and degrees.[4] This eighth part written in ordinary Servian, and essentially the same language which the Dalmatians and the greater part of the Croats speak, are all of very recent date.  Indeed, with the exception of a single writer, Obradovitch, who found no immediate followers, the dialect of the people was in general despised by the clergy and those who laid claim to education, as being wholly unfit for books, and (as Vuk Stephanovitch strongly expresses himself) only proper for “cowherds and swineherds.”  How the once flourishing literature of Ragusa could ever have sunk into oblivion to such a degree, is hardly to be conceived; as indeed, in general, the division so sharply drawn in respect to literature between those two branches of the same people, while they were still bound together by the strong ties of one and the same language of common life and in part also of the same government, belongs among the most remarkable facts in literary history.

The most ancient document of the Servian Old Slavic language, is out of the middle of the thirteenth century, viz. the Hexaemeron of Basilius, with a preface by John, exarch of Bulgaria.  Then follow the “Acts of the Apostles,” written by the hieromonach Damian, A.D. 1324.  Of higher historical importance are some secular writings from the end of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century, viz. a genealogical register of the Servian princes and the events of their reigns, called Radoslov, written by archbishop Daniel; a similar work called the Tzarostavnick; and above all the statutes of Tzar Dushan the Powerful, A.D. 1336-56.  These statutes, dated from the year 6837, or A.D. 1349, not only afford us a good survey of the constitution of the Servian kingdom, but are a remarkable contribution