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126 vocabulary, bring us nearer than any other living tongue to the older Indo-European tongues, Sanscrit and Lithuanian. Yet, in another sense, Russian may also be said to be one of the most recent of modern languages. It is true that as a spoken language and as the language of poetry it has produced from the early Middle Ages an inexhaustible literature of epic and song. But as a written and literary language, as a vehicle of prose, the Russian tongue is almost of yesterday. I have always firmly believed that linguistic development is not an evolutionary, unconscious process, but a conscious activity, that it is not natural but artificial because artistic. The history of Russian as a literary language fully confirms my theory. It might almost be contended that as a literary medium it has not grown, but has been made, and that even as the Russian State itself, the Russian language has been built up deliberately by philologists and academicians, and that its grammatical laws have been codified almost as autocratically as its political laws, although less arbitrarily. It is strange that reforming Russian despots like Peter, and Catherine the Great, although German princes by origin, should have realized the importance of the Russian