The Serb, belonging to the most poetical of nations, has the most melodious of all Slav tongues--identical with that of the Croats and yet used as the language of literature a comparatively short time. Even little more than a hundred years ago people were still arguing whether ancient Slavonic or the Serbian vernacular should be the language of literature. But for Dossitie Obradovitch this result might have been reached less quickly. He, "the great sower," a notable educator, applied the language of the people to literature, publishing an autobiography, besides poems and treatises, in the common tongue. Before his death, in 1811, the "Write as you speak" party had won, and literature became the property of the masses. Yet a further improvement in the language was undertaken by Vuk Karadgitch, a self-taught cripple, whose grammar, published in 1814, was epochal. He it was who devised the alphabet of thirty letters, each one representing a complete sound, and he published a dictionary and a collection of the pesmas which he took down from the mouths of the guslars who sang them. Then, when various translations appeared, Europe remembered vaguely that diplomats and travelers generations before had brought back accounts of Serbian poetry heard almost as often in those days in foreign countries as in Serbia itself. Goethe was one of the first to translate them and call attention to those pesmas. He praised their humor and philosophy, their high heroism mingled with certain spiritual qualities. Soon Sir John Bowring, a skilled linguist, made a translation into English verse which is nearer the original in spirit and letter than any that has been made since. There have also been many fine prose translations of the Kossovo cycle and of other pesmas, and all readers agree that in them is, as one critic says, "a clear and inborn poetry, such as can scarcely be found in any other modern people." "Serbian song," wrote Schafferik, "resembles the tone of the violin; old Slavonian, that of the organ; Polish, that of the guitar. The old Slavonian in the Psalms sounds like the loud rush of the mountain stream; the Polish like the sparkling and bubbling of a fountain; and the Serbian like the quiet murmuring of a streamlet in a valley."