order to stimulate them, he himself wrote original books and translations, thus ennobling, we are told, the literary vocation in the eyes of his rude and warlike race. He would probably have smiled if he had known that one of his writers had attributed to him the subjection of the Serbs; but what one would like to learn is whether Macedonia, even then a kaleidoscope of races, was more or less completely under the shadow and the brilliance of his sword, more or less completely subjugated. Four centuries later the Serbs were to have a Macedonian empire which, like Simeon's, dissolved on the death of its founder. To these old empires the Serb and the Bulgar of our day are looking back, and it would be interesting to know if harassed Macedonia was calmly content to be first Bulgarian and then Serbian, or whether it was a calm of that Eastern kind which means that a ruler's assaults upon the people are infrequent. WHAT ARE THE BULGARS? And now, as the matter is in dispute, it is necessary to examine the origin of the Bulgarian people. A band of Turanian or Bulgarian warriors, probably not over 10,000 in number and led by one Asperouch or Isperich, had crossed the Danube in the year 679, had subdued the Slav tribes in those parts--for the newcomers reaped the advantage of being a well-disciplined people--and by the end of the eighth century had settled down in their tents of felt along the banks of the Danube. Then, after another hundred years, in the district bounded by Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, one may say that the original Turanians, a branch of the Huns, had been absorbed by the Slavs. "The forefathers of the Bulgars," says the great Slavist, Dr. Constantine Jireček of Prague, in his _History of the Bulgars_, "are not the handful of Bulgars who conquered in 679 a part of Mœsia along the Danube, but the Slavs who much earlier had settled in Mœsia, as well as in Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus and almost the whole Peninsula." With regard to the retention of the name there is an analogy in France, where the Gauls came under the subjection of German Franks, who ultimately disappeared, but left their name to the country. So, too, the Greeks in Turkey who call themselves Romei, the name of their former rulers, and their language Romeica, though they are not Romans and do not speak Latin. To such an extent have the original Bulgars been absorbed by the Yugoslavs that even the most ancient known form of the Bulgarian language, dating from the ninth century, retains hardly any relics of the original Bulgarian tongue; and this tongue has in our time, with the exception of a word or two, been entirely lost: there is a celebrated old MS. in Moscow[11] which orientalists and historians have pondered over and which has now been explained by the Finnish professor Mikola and the Bulgarian professor Zlatarski to be a chronology of Bulgarian pagan princes, of whom the first are rather fabulous. Here and there, amid the old Slav, are strange words which