358 PRINCE— RARE OLD SLAVONIC RELIGIOUS MANUAL. 



corone doppo morte F{^fanno) iivlla, "scepters and crowns are 

 of no avail after death," and on the right, of a man, apparently a 

 king, with the Italian device: caran(?)o (=corono) la vita mcntre 

 opero bene, "1 crown (my) life by working well." On the rear 

 binding on the left, is a portrait of a man with the words : colgi le 

 rose e lassa star le spine, " pluck the roses and leave the thorns," 

 and on the right, of a woman with the partially erased phrase : c- . . . 

 misura ogni suo passo. There is no title-page, the text beginning 

 directly, as shown by the accompanying plate, with the Glagolitic 

 alphabet, followed by a complete syllabary {ha, he, hi, ho, bu, hy, h:) 

 and the Pater Noster and Ave Maria. 



The Church Slavonic language was originally the vernacular of 

 the Macedonian Slavs at the time of SS. Cyril and Method, the two 

 great Greek missioners of the Eastern Orthodox faith to the wild 

 Slavonic tribes. When these various Slavonic peoples adopted the 

 Eastern form of Christianity with its accompanying rite, this lan- 

 guage began to take on different aspects under the influence of the 

 particular idioms. Thus, we find a Serbo-Croatian, a Russian and 

 a Bulgarian reduction of the Old Slavonic, in each of which coun- 

 tries the older language appears partially disguised under the garb 

 of the respective vernacular. It should be remarked that the Serbs 

 and Croats are linguistically identical, differing only, in that the 

 Serbs write their language in a modified form of the Cyrillic 

 alphabet, while the Croats, who are for the most part Roman 

 Catholics, use the Latin letters. The Old Slavonic, having been 

 accepted at an early date as the idiom of the Scriptures and the 

 Liturgy, naturally became the first literary language of the Serbo- 

 Croats. Although this Church language was not identical with the 

 Serbo-Croatian vernacular of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 

 it must have been fairly intelligible, as it became the regular literary 

 medium in the hands of the ecclesiastical classes, from whom all 

 literature naturally proceeded. From the thirteenth to the eight- 

 eenth centuries, all Serb books were, therefore, printed in the Old 

 Slavonic of the Serb redaction, under which head much of the early 

 Croatian literature also falls, although the Ragusan and Dalmatian 

 literatures made use of the actual vernacular as their vehicle much 



