d, the attachment to their own language was too
deeply rooted to be taken away at once. Hence the Old Slavic idiom,
with the pope's reluctant permission, continued to be the language of
the Church service. It appears, however, that the alphabet which their
priests employed for writing their ecclesiastic documents, was not the
same with that used by other Slavi of the oriental church: but was of
a different character, and evidently _not_ derived from the Greek,
with the exception of a few letters. It was called the _Glagolitic._

_Glagol_ signifies in Old Slavic _the word_ or rather _the verb_; but
the reason of the application of this term to the Illyrico-Servians of
the catholic communion (_Glagolitae)_, and to the language of their
sacred writings (_Glagolic_ or _Glagolitic_), has not yet been
ascertained; all that has as yet been asserted by Slavic philologians
being mere hypothesis. The oldest monument known up to 1830. in which
these letters were extant, was a Psalter of A.D. 1220. This Psalter
was by tradition ascribed to St. Jerome himself, who was in general
called the inventor of the Slavic, that is the _Glagolitic_ alphabet.
According to a popular legend of the Dalmatians, this father, who was
a native of Illyria, also translated the whole Bible into the Slavic;
but it has been since clearly proved, that while (as is well known) he
corrected the old Latin version of the Bible, he yet never wrote a
single line of Slavic.

The mystery, in which the origin of the Glagolitic was and still is
buried, gave birth to the singular hypothesis already above
mentioned.[18] The discovery however of several very ancient
Glagolitic manuscripts, and especially of one which could be proved to
be older than the Council of Spalatro[19] destroyed it at once; but
unfortunately, without clearing up the mystery either of its invention
or of its introduction.

Another Glagolitic manuscript of some interest may be mentioned here.
It was generally known, that the kings of France were accustomed, at
their coronation at Kheiras, to take the oath on a large book, called
_Texte du Sacre_, bound in gold or gilding, and covered with unwrought
precious stones, which contained the Gospels written in some unknown
hieroglyphic language. When in 1717 Tzar Peter I. visited Rheims, this
book was shown to him among other curiosities, and he exclaimed at
once: "This is my own Slavonic!" This view was soon spread among
Slavic scholars. But the prec