s to approach in
a certain measure to the Coptic characters. To give some authority to
the new invention, it was ascribed to St. Jerome. This, it was
maintained, is the Glagolitic alphabet, so called, used by the Slavic
priests of Dalmatia and Croatia until the present time. Cyril's
translation of the Bible and the liturgic books were copied in these
characters, with a very few deviations in the language; which probably
had their foundation in the difference of the Dalmatian dialect, or
were the result of the progress of time; for this event took place at
least 360 years after the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet. With
this modification, the priests succeeded in satisfying both the people
and the chair of Rome. It _sounded_ the same to the people, and
_looked_ different to the pope. The people submitted easily to the
ceremonies of the Romish worship, if only their beloved language was
preserved; and the pope, fearing justly the transition of the whole
Slavic population of those provinces to the Greek church, permitted
the mass to be read in Slavonic, in order to preserve his influence in
general.

This hypothesis had come to be pretty generally received; when in the
year 1830, some Glagolitic manuscripts, which bore very decided
evidence of being at least as old as the middle of the eleventh
century, were discovered by Kopitar in the library of Count Clotz in
Tyrol. The existence of the calumniated alphabet at a period
cotemporary with the oldest Cyrillic manuscript known (the Evangelium
of Ostromir), was a death-blow to the above singular narrative.
Kopitar published the newly discovered Codex, accompanied by a
thundering philippic against the defenders of the former theory, and
in favour of the antiquity of the Glagolitic alphabet, and of the
Pannonian origin of the Slavic liturgy.[16] But here the matter
rested. Nothing has since been discovered, (so far as we are
informed,) to throw light on the first invention or introduction of
this alphabet; no connecting link to explain its relation to the
Cyrillic forms of writing.

According to Vostokof, a Russian scholar of great learning, and one of
the principal names in Old Slavic literature,[17] the history of the
Old Slavic or Church language and its literary cultivation, may be
divided into three periods:

1. From Cyril, or from the ninth century, to the thirteenth century.
This is the _ancient_ genuine Slavonic; as appears from the
manuscripts of that period.