have become lighter.  The ancient wedding songs, full of pagan allusions, have been supplanted by glees mostly composed by their half German pastors; the only educated men who still speak their language.  Indeed, not a few of their most popular ballads are written by their curates.  How soon these will be superseded by German songs, no one can say; but it requires no great stretch of prophetic power to predict, that the time is near at hand.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Volks und Meisterlieder, Frankf. a.M. 1817.]

[Footnote 2:  De Bello Gothico, lib. iii. c. 14.]

[Footnote 3:  Vol.  I. p. 69.]

[Footnote 4:  Geschichte der Slavischen Sprache und Literatur, p. 52.]

[Footnote 5:  This song is among the few, which Russian critics think as ancient as the sixteenth century.  See Karamzin’s History of Russia, Vol.  X, p. 264.]

[Footnote 6:  Bowring’a translation.]

[Footnote 7:  The piece to which we allude was in the possession of the Cardinal Albani, at Rome; but has since been carried to England.  A fine copy in plaster is in the Museum at Paris; from which numerous drawings have been taken, now scattered all over Europe.]

[Footnote 8:  Kunst und Alterthum, Vol.  II. p. 49.]

[Footnote 9 Narodne Srpske Pjesme skup. i izd.  Vuk etc.  Leipz. 1824.  Vol.  I. p. 55. Volkslieder der Serben, von Talvj, Halle 1825.  Vol.  I. p. 46.]

[Footnote 10:  Pronounced Yelitza.]

[Footnote 11:  The whole of this tale is translated in Bowring’s little volume of “Servian Popular Poetry.”]

[Footnote 12:  The Greek ballad is entitled “The Journey by Night,” and begins thus: 

  Manna, me tous ennea sou uious, kai me ten mia sou kore.

  ‘O mother, thou, with thy nine sons, and with thine only daughter.’

A Russian ballad also begins very similarly: 

  “At Kief, in that famous town,
    Resided a rich widow;
  Nine sons the widow of Kief had,
    The tenth was a daughter dear.”

The story however is essentially different.]

[Footnote 13:  See above p. 306, n. 2.]

[Footnote 14:  This remarkable fact is mentioned by all Russian historians, on the good authority of the ancient annalist Nestor.]

[Footnote 15:  “The Tshuvashes have a Penate, which they call Erich.  This Erich is nothing but a bundle of broom, cytisus, tied together in the middle with the inner bark of the linden.  It consists of fifteen branches of equal size, about four feet long; above is a piece of tin attached to it.  Each house has such an Erich, which usually stands in a corner of the entry.  Nobody ventures to touch it.  When it becomes dry, a new Erich is tied together, and the old one placed in running water with great reverence.”  See Stimmen des Russ.  Volks, von P.v.  Goetze, Stuttg. 1828, page 17.—­The Tshuvashes, however, are not a Slavic, but a Finnish race, living under the Russian dominion.]