3.  The White-Russian is the dialect spoken in Lithuania and a portion of White Russia, especially Volhynia.  The situation of these provinces sufficiently accounts for its being full of Polisms.  All the historical documents of Lithuania are written in this dialect; and several Russian writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed it in preference to the Old Slavonic.  The first Russian translation of the Bible was written in it.  It is the youngest of the Russian dialects.

What first strikes us in considering the Russian language as a whole, is its immense copiousness.  The early influence of foreign nations appears here as a decided advantage.  The German, in the highest degree susceptible for foreign ideas and forms of thought, repels nevertheless all foreign words and forms of expression as unnatural excrescences.  It is evidently disfigured by the adoption of foreign words, and can preserve its beauty only by adhering to its own national and inexhaustible sources.  The Russian, having been in early times successively subjected to the influence of the Scandinavian, Mongolian, Tartar, and Polish languages, is in this respect to be compared, in a certain measure, with the English, in which the ancient British, the Latin, the Saxon, the Danish, and the French, amalgamated in the same proportion as the ideas of these different nations were adopted.  Hence nothing that ever contributed to the singular composition of this rich language, appears to be borrowed; but all belongs to it as its lawful property.  But the great pre-eminence of the Russian appears in the use which it made of these adopted treasures.  Its greater flexibility made it capable of employing foreign words merely as roots, from which it raised stems and branches by means of its own native resources.  It is this copiousness and variety of radical syllables, which gives to the Russian in certain respects a claim over all other Slavic languages.

Another excellence is the great freedom of construction which it allows, without any danger of becoming unintelligible or even ambiguous.  It resembles in this point the classic languages; from which however its small number of conjunctions decidedly distinguishes it.  This want of conjunctions has been objected to the language as a defect; it seems however to be one of the causes, why it is so remarkably clear and distinct; since it can only admit of comparatively short phrases.  In spite of this clearness, its adaptedness for poetry is undeniable; and in this branch the incomparable national songs extant in it would afford a most noble foundation even in respect to forms, if nature could ever obtain a complete victory over the perverted taste of fashion.  Whether this language is really capable of entirely imitating the classic metres, is still a matter of dispute among distinguished Slavic philologians.[3] As to its euphony, what has been said above in respect to the Slavic languages in general, may be applied particularly to the Russian.  Here however the ear of the unprejudiced listener alone can decide.