allowance), and they vow not to return to their families until they shall have succeeded in their quest of a happy man in Russia. Their first encounter is with a priest, who in response to their questions, asks if happiness does not consist in "peace, wealth, and 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."