Of course there were some manuscripts that told the ancient history, but these were rarely printed and they remained hidden in the various archives and libraries. Thus there was the _Istoria Rusov, the History of the Rus’_, probably by Hrihori Poletika, who had prepared an appeal for the old rights of the Kozaks for presentation to Catherine the Great. Later this work was to have considerable influence on the development of the study of Ukrainian history. It was to inspire Kostomarov, Kulish and Shevchenko, but it was still an unknown work collecting dust in the archives and not valued even by the few people who stumbled upon it. The condition of the language was still more tragic. No one thought of using the vernacular speech, the language of the folksongs and the dumy in writing. The burden of Church Slavonic lay as a heavy weight upon the people and even a man like Skovoroda did not venture to challenge this spectre. After all, Church Slavonic had served a noble purpose in the past. It had been the distinguishing work of Orthodoxy. It had contributed to the splendid culture of Kiev in the beginning, but it was now outmoded. Even so, the Church Slavonic of the day was not the language of the early Chronicles. It had been brought from the Balkans by the first Christian monks that had penetrated the country. The people had received it at the time of the baptism of the nation and it was hoary with age and sacred from its many traditions. It required a man of genius to defy the centuries of reverence that it had acquired. In the early days, the old Balkan Church Slavonic had been modified to make it more intelligible to the people. There had been no attempts to translate it into the popular speech, but step by step popular words crept in and within the old framework there had come something that was well on its way to being the speech of the people. The cultural revival of the sixteenth century, with its emphasis upon religion and Orthodoxy, with its attempts to purify the national faith and consciousness, looked askance at these innovations. Patriotic and intelligent men had believed that the advance of Polonization and of the Roman Catholic Church could only be checked by a more rigid adherence to the old standards. As a result, with the best intentions in the world, the scholars of the sixteenth century and of the Kiev school worked directly against the popularization of the language. Their program was strikingly similar to that of the Ciceronian Latinists of the Renaissance who tried to make their Latin purely classical in scope, vocabulary and grammar and who only succeeded in making Latin truly a dead language.