Page:The Ballads of Marko Kraljević.djvu/17

 lulled infant Oscars to sleep, the Royal House of Scandinavia adopted the name as one worthy of its kingly line, and on Goethe's youthful hero the Celtic Muse produced all the symptoms of intoxication. "Homer," cries Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me!" The sentiment is, doubtless, a not unfaithful reflection of the poet's own attitude at the time, and he was one of many.

In Italy we can trace the same chain of cause and effect, and it is to an Italian, the Abbate Alberto Fortis, that the credit is due of acting as the first interpreter between the Serbs and the more cultured peoples of the West. A well-known naturalist in his day, he was personally acquainted with Cesarotti the translator of Ossian, and was himself a profound admirer of Macpherson's gloomy genius. The importance of this preoccupation is that when he made his expeditions to Dalmatia and the Adriatic islands, his mind was already prepared to observe and note any evidence there might be of the existence of an oral tradition among the people. Being but very imperfectly acquainted with the Serbian language, he was unable to address himself directly to the peasants, and was therefore entirely dependent in this respect on the good offices of his learned Dalmatian friends. These latter supplied him with examples of alleged folk-song and helped in the task of translating them into Italian.

In 1771 Fortis published his Saggio d' Osservazioni sopra l' isola di Cherso ed Osero, in which there appeared the first translation from the Serbian into a modern tongue. It was the "Canto di Milos Cobilich e di Vuko Brankovich ." The poem as here given comes from Kačić, a fact of which Fortis was evidently ignorant, although how it happened that his Dalmatian friends did not enlighten him is a point that has never been explained. They may have regarded Kačić as a mere compiler of national ballads, and so considered his name as of small