While the Serbs were flourishing, ecclesiastically, in the Banat, the Bulgars had been painfully keeping alive, until 1767, their lonely Patriarchate at Ochrida. Time and again the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople had tried to suppress it, at first on account of cupidity and afterwards, say the Bulgars, for fear lest it should help to arouse the Bulgarian national spirit; but that spirit had fallen to such a depth that the second edition of a comparative lexicon of the Slav languages, which was issued, at the behest of the Empress Catharine in 1791, makes no mention of Bulgarian, and in 1814 the Slavist Dobrovsky regarded Bulgarian as a form of Serbian. And yet, say the Bulgars, the national spirit survived so wonderfully by those far waters of Macedonia that even when the Greek language was introduced into the offices and the Church administration, and when Greeks had usurped the throne of St. Clement, they still found it possible to stand out for the independence of their Church, which handed on the memories of the Bulgarian past. We must be allowed to be sceptical--the town of Ochrida in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is said by contemporary writers to be now in Serbian, now in Bulgarian, now in Macedonian territory. And the very observant Patriarch Brkić of the eighteenth century tells us, in a calm, passionless description of the diocese, which he wrote in exile--he was the last Patriarch of Peć--that the inhabitants of a place called Rekalije, in the district of Djakovica, are not Albanians but Serbs and Bulgars who had been, a short time before, converted to Islam. It seems probable that the sharp divisions of Serb, Bulgar, and so on, did not then exist, and that the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople did himself not know what variety of reprehensible Slav it was that lived in those parts.... The last Patriarch of Ochrida, whose name was likewise Arsenius, spent the remainder of his life in exile at Mt. Athos, and there, in another monastery, was a pale, sickly monk, poring over crabbed MSS. This Païssu, a Bulgar, had entered, like his elder brother, the great Serbian monastery of Hilendar. We know from him that while the various Orthodox monks of Mt. Athos--Greeks, Bulgars, Russians, Serbs and Vlachs--were frequently at loggerheads, yet the others even more frequently combined to fall upon the Bulgars and to upbraid them because their history had not been glorious and because they had an insufficient number of saints. The Bulgar was nothing but a servant of the Greek; Bulgarian was no doubt written in a monastery here and there, but as for the spoken language, were not the townsfolk often ashamed of it? Did they not prefer to talk Greek? "I was filled with sadness," says Païssu, "on account of my race." There happened to be at Hilendar the monk Obradović, who was less enthusiastic about Glagolitic than about the songs sung by the peasant. With the fundamental thought of