78 MONTENEGRO 



passing the painted pillar that marks the frontier, you 

 feel, or ought to feel, ready to put the shoes from off 

 your feet, as if the very ground were holy. You are 

 entering territory sanctified by patriotic heroism almost 

 without parallel in the history of the nations. If it be 

 the birthright of every Scot to claim share in the glory 

 of three centuries of unequal, but successful, struggle 

 for independence, who shall set bounds to the legiti- 

 mate pride of the Montenegrin in his retrospect over 

 nearly twice that period, during which this race of moun- 

 taineers have stemmed the tide of Ottoman conquest, 

 which not only absorbed all other Balkan states, but 

 threatened to overwhelm the entire civilisation of the 

 West ? We Scots had a land frontier of barely three- 

 score miles to defend ; but the patriots of Tzerna Gora 

 were girt north, south, east, and west by insatiable 

 foes. Times without number the Scots were succoured 

 in extremity by their French allies; but the Monte- 

 negrins had no access to the sea until their inde- 

 pendence received tardy recognition in the Treaty 

 of Berlin in 1878, when the port of Antivari was 

 granted to them, followed in 1880 by the cession of 

 Dulcigno. 



These undaunted highlanders beheld all their neigh- 

 bours, one after another, lower the Cross before the 

 Crescent. Servia became a Turkish province in 1459 ; 

 Bosnia followed in 1463 ; Albania was annexed in 1467, 

 and Herzegovina in 1476. Montenegro, or the Zenta 

 as it was then called, was bereft of its capital on the 

 Lake of Skodra or Scutari in the fifteenth century ; but 

 Ivan Czernovich, gathering his people round him in 



