Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/618

 rich and populous metropolis of England; and when there was no printing-press in Oxford, or in Cambridge, or in Edinburgh. It was only sixteen years after the first printing-press had been established (1468) in Rome, the capital of Christendom; only twenty-eight years after the appearance (1456) of the earliest printed book, the first-born of the great discovery.

Then and there,

voted unanimously their fundamental law, that, in time of war against the Turk, no son of Tsernagora could quit the field without the order of his chief; that a run-away should be forever disgraced, and banished from his people; that he should be dressed in woman's clothes, and presented with a distaff; and that the women, striking him with their distaffs, should hunt the coward away from the sanctuary of freedom.

And, now for four centuries wanting only seven years, they have maintained in full force the covenant of that awful day, through an unbroken series of trials, of dangers, and of exploits, to which it is hard to find a parallel in the annals of Europe, perhaps even of mankind.

It was not to be expected that the whole mass of any race or people should have the almost preterhuman energy, which their lot required. All along, from time to time, the weaker brethren have fallen away; and there were those who said to Ivan, as the Israelites said to Moses, "Wherefore have ye made us to come up out of Egypt, to bring us into this evil place?" The great Ivan died in 1490, and was succeeded by his eldest son George, who in 1499 was persuaded by his Venetian wife to go back into the habitable world; not of Islam, however, but at Venice. Worse than this, his younger brother Stephen had gone with a band of companions to Constantinople and proposed to Bajazet the Second the betrayal of his country. He, and those whom he took with him, were required to turn Mahometans, and they did it. None could be so fit, as traitors, to be renegades. They then set out with an Ottoman force for the work of conquest. They were met by George, and utterly defeated. But these victors, the men of the printing-press as well as of the sword, were no savages by nature, only afterwards when the Turks in time made them so.

They took back their renegade fellow-countrymen into Montenegro, and allowed them the free exercise of their religion,

On the retirement of George, which seems only to have become final in 1516, the departing prince made over the sovereign power to the metropolitan. And now began, and lasted for three hundred and thirty-six years, an ecclesiastical government in miniature over laymen, far more noble than that of the popes in its origin and purer in its exercise, as well as in some respects not less remarkable. The epithet I have last used may raise a smile. But the greatness of human action, and of human character, do not principally depend on the dimensions of the stage where they are exhibited. In the fifth century, and, before the temporal power arose, there was a Leo as truly great as any of the famous mediaeval pontiffs. The traveller may stand upon the rock of Corinth, and look, across and along the gulf, to the Acropolis of Athens; and may remember, with advantage no less than with wonder, that these little states of parochial extension, were they that shook the world of their own day, and that have instructed all posterity. But the basileus, whom Greece had to keep at arm's length, had his seat afar; and, even for those within his habitual reach, was no grinding tyrant. Montenegro fought with a valor that rivalled, if it did not surpass, that of Thermopylæ and Marathon; with numbers and resources far inferior, against a foe braver and far more, terrible. A long series of about twenty prelates, like Moses, or Joshua, or Barak, or the son of Jesse, taught in the sanctuary, presided in the council, and fought in the front of the battle. There were among them many, who were admirable statesmen. These were especially of the Nicgush family, which came in the year 1687 to the permanent possession of power: a power so little begirt with the conveniences of life, and so well weighted with responsibility and care, that in the free air of these mountains it was never coveted, and never abused.

Under the fourteen vladikas, who had ruled for one hundred and seventy years before this epoch, the people of Montenegro not only lived sword in hand, for this they have since done and still do, but nourished in their bosom an enemy more deadly, say the historians than the pashas and their armies. Not only were 