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 All the historical documents of Lithuania are written in this dialect; and several Russian writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed it in preference to the Old Slavonic.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.