is there anyone who, because some of the Slavs were and are unwise enough to be more Italian than the Italians, will assert that the Slav has no right to develop a national art, a national State? It is superfluous to make a catalogue of those Ragusan writers who were more or less successful in purging their Slav language of Italianisms. Luckily they had at their doors the language of Herzegovina, which is unanimously considered by philologists to be the purest of the Serbo-Croat dialects. The most considerable of these writers was Gundulić, although he never could forget that his productions must be pious, and, beyond all other aims, present a moral. It was in Poland that he saw the liberator of the Southern Slavs, and what he sings in Osman, his chief work, is the overthrow of Sultan Osman II. by Vladislav, heir to the Polish throne. As this poem of the seventeenth century, this flowering of the Slav spirit, might be looked upon as assailing "the integrity of the Turkish Empire," it was only allowed to circulate in MS. until 1830. According to Dr. Murko,[26] Professor of Slav Language and Literature at the University of Leipzig, this work surpasses Tasso's _Jerusalem Delivered_; but it is commonly thought that there is more literary merit in Gundulić's _Dubravka_, a lovely, patriotic pastoral. The worthy Franciscan Kačić,[27] who followed him with a work--_Familiar Conversations on the Slovene Nation_--would perhaps be regarded by us as more remarkable for his originality; but this patriotic production, in verse and in prose, didactic, chronological, allegorical and epic, has made him immortal. Beginning with Teuta, the first king of the Slovene nation, who flourished, says the author, about the year 3732 B.C., he proceeds imperturbably and sometimes in moving numbers to relate the lives and virtues of all the other Slovene kings, be they Bosnian, Croat, Serbian, Bulgarian; it may well be that the secret of his vogue is, in the words of the critic Lucianović, that "he was less a minstrel of the past than of the future." On the fruitful island of Hvar (Lesina) there arose an exquisite lyric poet, Lucić, whose romantic drama _Robinja_ (The Female Slave) is said to have great importance in the history of the modern theatre; but the most famous of Hvar's poets was Hektorović (1487-1572). "This nobleman with his democratic ideas," says the Russian savant Petrovski in speaking of his _Ribanje_ (Fishing), "is the intimate friend of his fisher-folk, the singers of national songs, and with his remarkable realism he was three centuries before his time." When we finally note that at Zadar in the sixteenth century there was written _Planine_ (The Mountains), in which Zoranić gave us the most patriotic work of mediæval Yugoslav literature, we may say at least that the Dalmatian Yugoslavs did not abandon hope.