d honor?" He
then describes his life, and demonstrates that a priest gets none of
these things. As they proceed on their way, they meet and interrogate
people from all ranks and classes. This affords the poet an opportunity
for a series of pictures from Russian life, replete with national
characteristics, stories, arguments, songs, described in varying meters.
The whole forms a splendid and profoundly interesting national
picture-gallery.

The movements of the '40's and the '60's brought to the front several
poets who sprang directly from the people. On the borderland of the two
epochs stands the most renowned of Little Russian poets, Taras
Grigorievitch Shevtchenko (1814-1861). He was the contemporary of
Koltzoff and Byelinsky, rather than of Nekrasoff; nevertheless, he may
be regarded as a representative of the latter's epoch, in virtue of the
contents and the spirit of his poetry.

His history is both interesting and remarkable. He was the son of a
serf, in the government of Kieff. When he was eight years old his mother
died, and his father married again. His stepmother favored her own
children, and to constant quarrels between the two broods, incessant
altercation between the parents was added. At the age of eleven, when
his father died, he began a roving life. He ran away from a couple of
ecclesiastics who had undertaken to teach him to read and write (after
having acquired the rudiments of those arts), and made numerous
ineffectual attempts to obtain instruction in painting from various
wretched daubers of holy pictures, having been addicted, from his
earliest childhood, to scrawling over the walls of the house and the
fences with charcoal drawings. He was obliged to turn shepherd. In 1827
he was taken on as one of his master's household servants, and sent to
Vilna, where at first he served as scullion. Later on, it was decided
that he "was fitted to become the household painter."

But he served at first as personal attendant on his master and handed
him a light for his pipe, until his master caught him one night drawing
a likeness of Kazak Platoff, whereupon he pulled Shevtchenko's ears,
cuffed him, ordered him to be flogged, but simultaneously acquired the
conviction that the lad might be converted into a painter to the
establishment. So Shevtchenko began to study under a Vilna artist, and a
year and a half later, by the advice of his teacher, who recognized his
talent, the master sent the lad to a portrait-p