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.
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