account the Slavs were wise enough to
profit from the Italian masters; is there anyone who, because some of
the Slavs were and are unwise enough to be more Italian than the
Italians, will assert that the Slav has no right to develop a national
art, a national State?

It is superfluous to make a catalogue of those Ragusan writers who
were more or less successful in purging their Slav language of
Italianisms. Luckily they had at their doors the language of
Herzegovina, which is unanimously considered by philologists to be the
purest of the Serbo-Croat dialects. The most considerable of these
writers was Gunduli['c], although he never could forget that his
productions must be pious, and, beyond all other aims, present a
moral. It was in Poland that he saw the liberator of the Southern
Slavs, and what he sings in Osman, his chief work, is the overthrow of
Sultan Osman II. by Vladislav, heir to the Polish throne. As this poem
of the seventeenth century, this flowering of the Slav spirit, might
be looked upon as assailing "the integrity of the Turkish Empire," it
was only allowed to circulate in MS. until 1830. According to Dr.
Murko,[26] Professor of Slav Language and Literature at the
University of Leipzig, this work surpasses Tasso's _Jerusalem
Delivered_; but it is commonly thought that there is more literary
merit in Gunduli['c]'s _Dubravka_, a lovely, patriotic pastoral. The
worthy Franciscan Ka[vc]i['c],[27] who followed him with a
work--_Familiar Conversations on the Slovene Nation_--would perhaps be
regarded by us as more remarkable for his originality; but this
patriotic production, in verse and in prose, didactic, chronological,
allegorical and epic, has made him immortal. Beginning with Teuta, the
first king of the Slovene nation, who flourished, says the author,
about the year 3732 B.C., he proceeds imperturbably and sometimes in
moving numbers to relate the lives and virtues of all the other
Slovene kings, be they Bosnian, Croat, Serbian, Bulgarian; it may well
be that the secret of his vogue is, in the words of the critic
Lucianovi['c], that "he was less a minstrel of the past than of the
future." On the fruitful island of Hvar (Lesina) there arose an
exquisite lyric poet, Luci['c], whose romantic drama _Robinja_ (The
Female Slave) is said to have great importance in the history of the
modern theatre; but the most famous of Hvar's poets was Hektorovi['c]
(1487-1572). "This nobleman with his democratic ideas,"