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Rh outside the pale of the Church all was barbarism. At first, the writer was a mere mechanical laborer, or Chinese scribe, who laboriously copied the Gospels and the ancient Scriptures. He was respected as possessing one of the arcana of life, and as specially gifted through a miracle from on high. Many generations of monks passed away before the idea occurred to these humble copyists to utilize their art in recording their own personal impressions. At first there were homilies, mere imitations of those of the Byzantine fathers; then lives of saints; and the legendary lore of the monastery of Kiev, the great centre of prayer and holy travail of the whole Slavonic world. Here originated the first approach to romance of that time, its Golden Legend, the first effort of the imagination towards the ideal which is so seductive to every human soul. Then came the chronicles of wars, and of their attendant and consequent evils. Nestor, the father of Russian history, noted down his impressions of what he saw, in a style similar to that of Gregory of Tours.

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, these feeble germs of culture were nearly crushed out of existence by the Tartar invasion; and even the translation of the Bible into the Slavonic language was not accomplished until the year 1498.

In 1518, Maximus, a Greek monk, who had lived in Florence with Savonarola, came to Moscow, bringing with him the first specimens of