The second stage in the revival was the introduction of Romanticism. This movement tended to look back toward the past. Its masters, in Russia and Poland and in all other countries, sought striking episodes from the past. They looked for outbursts of unbridled passion, of daring and of excitement and they found it in plenty among the Kozaks. _The History of the Rus’_ was now printed and it, even more than Karamzin’s _History of the Russian Empire_, became the source book for the Romantic writers. Pushkin knew of it in Russian and so did Kondraty Fedorovich Ryleyev, that stormy petrel of the Decembrist movement who paid with his life for his participation in the movement in 1825. Many of his best poems dealt with the exploits of the old rulers of Kiev, of the Kozaks, of Nalyvayko and Voynarovsky, the nephew of Mazepa. Even though they tried to keep within the confines of the lawful type of Russian history, they could not fail to emphasize those qualities of personal independence which were rarely stressed in Muscovite tradition. Nikolay Gogol, the son of one of the earliest writers in Ukrainian, felt the same drive and in _Taras Bulba_ he pictured the unbridled courage and daring of the old Kozaks in their struggle against the Poles. The Poles too felt this same influence and there appeared again a large number of Polish poems with their scenes located in Ukraine among the Kozaks. It was to this phase of the revival that Taras Shevchenko, who was to be the stabilizer of Ukrainian and its greatest master, belongs. In the _Kobzar_, after dealing with various aspects of Ukrainian life and legend, all typical of the Romantic movement at its best, he turns to themes from Kozak history; and in the _Night of Taras_, in _Ivan Pidkova_, and later in the _Haydamaki_ and _Hamaliya_, he gives us some of the greatest poems in Ukrainian when he describes the campaigns of the Kozaks against the Poles and the Turks. It is noticeable that most of these themes deal with the struggle against the Poles. That was more filled with the type of episode which suited the Romantic poet than was the period of conflict between the Hetman state and Moscow. The grinding force of the Russian steam-roller had prevented incidents of the old traditional type and we need not wonder that the Romantic poets in their desire to go back to the distant past paid more attention to events of the days before Khmelnitsky, when the Kozaks were the most democratic, the most unrestrained, and the most successful.