Vuk Stephanovitch Karadshitch, born 1786 in Turkish Servia, is the author of the first Oriental-Servian grammar and dictionary; and in the arrangement of the former has manifested the true spirit of a genuine grammarian.  Besides these he has written several works of value, a biography of Prince Milosh, a series of annuals, a volume on the Proverbs, and idiomatic phrases of the Servians, etc.[11] But the best proof which he could give of the beauty, richness, and perfectibility of the vulgar Servian dialect, is his Collection of the Servian popular Songs, in four volumes, comprising nevertheless only about the fourth or fifth part of the similar treasures hidden among the mountains of his country.  In making this collection, he very judiciously wrote down only those songs which he had himself caught from the lips of the Servian peasantry.  There had already been a rumour among the literati of Europe, for more than fifty years, of the beauty and singularity of the Illyrian national songs, founded mostly on the communications of Italian travellers and the citations of Dalmatian dictionaries.  Herder, in his valuable Collection of popular Poetry, gave two historical fragments from the work of a Dalmatian clergyman, A. Cacich.[12] Goethe also has a beautiful tale, taken from Abbate Fortis’ Travels among the Morlachians.  Both translated by means of the French; and although this double translation could not possibly do justice to the originals, they were sufficiently admired.  But when Vuk’s collection appeared, and a part of its contents was made intelligible to the civilized world by a translation attempted by the author of this work, imperfect and deficient as any translation of popular poetry must necessarily ever be, the public and the critics were nevertheless alike struck with the strong expression of the high and incomparable beauties of nature.  All that the other Slavic nations, or the Germans, the Scotch, and the Spaniards, possess of popular poetry, can at the utmost be compared with the lyrical part of the Servian songs, called by them female songs, because they are sung only by females and youths; but the long epic extemporized compositions, by which a peasant bard, sitting in a large circle of other peasants, in unpremeditated but perfectly regular and harmonious verse, celebrates the heroic deeds of their ancestors or cotemporaries, has no parallel in the whole history of literature since the days of Homer.[13]

Vuk Stephanovitch Karadshitc,[14] in his successful attempts to reduce a language, which hitherto had been merely an unwritten dialect of the common people, to certain general rules and principles, had, besides the more philosophical part of the work, also to adapt the Slavonic alphabet to his purpose.  The mixed and unregulated language, which up to his time had been employed, had been written alternately with the Old Slavonic and the Russian letters.  To the Russian language, with its multitude of sounds, the latter