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128 the more necessary to impress this fact upon our minds, if we want duly to appreciate the marvellous results which the Russian language has achieved in so incredibly short a time.

III existed for ages mainly as an oral language, as the language of song and romance, and continuing a precarious and humble existence as the voice of the down-trodden and inarticulate serf, the Russian language would probably have been broken up into dialects innumerable, and the Russian nationality itself would have been submerged in the nationality of its hereditary enemies, the Poles, if the ancient speech had not been preserved in its essential forms in the language of the Church and the translation of the Bible. Church Slavonic has done for the Russian people what the translation of Ulfilas did for the Goths, what Luther's Bible has done for the Germans, what the Authorized Version has done for the English. It has supplied an ideal standard of speech, a testo de lingua, which makes the study of Slavonic indispensable for literary as well as for political purposes. But Slavonic has done a great deal more for the Russian people; it has welded