, it was taken up repeatedly in the course of the
same and the following century, until the revision of the liturgical
books was pronounced to be finished in A.D. 1667; but that of the
Bible not before A.D. 1751. The principles on which this revision, or,
as it was called, _Improvement_, was made, were in direct conflict
with the reverence due to the genius of the Slavic language. The
revisers, in their unphilosophical mode of proceeding, tried only to
imitate the Greek original, and to assimilate the grammatical part of
the language, as much as possible, to the Russian of their own times.
They all acted in the conviction, that the language of the Bible and
liturgical books was merely _obsolete Russian_. Even the latest
revisers of the Bible, in 1751, knew nothing of Cyril or Methodius;
and had no doubt, that the first translation was made in Russia under
Vladimir the Great, A.D. 988, in the language which was then spoken.

Such other works in Old Slavic, as were the productions of this
period, seem rather to belong to the history of the Russian and
Servian literature. We have seen from the preceding, that the Old
Slavic had altered considerably; nay, was in a certain measure
amalgamated with those dialects. We shall see in the sequel, how it
was gradually supplanted by them.[22]

The printing of works in the Old Slavic, at the present day, is almost
exclusively limited to the Bible and to what is in immediate
connection with it. The first printed Slavonic work was set in
Glagolitic letters. This was a missal of A.D. 1483.[23] The earliest
Cyrillic printing office was founded about A.D. 1490, at Kracow, by
Svaipold Feol. Nearly at the same time, 1492, they began in Servia and
Herzegovina to print with Cyrillic types. In A.D. 1518, a
Cyrillic-Slavonic printing office was established at Venice; and about
the same time, a part of the Old Testament in the White-Russian
dialect, printed with Cyrillic letters, was published at Prague in
Bohemia.

In Russia, now the principal seat of the eastern Slavic literature,
printing was not introduced until after the middle of the sixteenth
century. The first work was published in Moscow A.D. 1564, an edition
of the _Apostle_, executed by the united skill of two printers. It
would seem, however, that they did not succeed in Russia; for a few
years after we find one of them in Lemberg, occupied in printing the
same book; and the other at Wilna, in printing the Gospels. In Russia,
the