It was a sad life that Shevchenko had led. Out of his forty-seven years, he had been a serf for 24, in the army 10, and under police supervision for three and a half, so that there were only nine years under which he could feel himself a free man to come and go as he would. There is hardly any other writer of the same prominence to whom fate was so uniformly unkind. Yet despite it all and despite all the obstacles which he had to face he had succeeded in placing Ukrainian literature on its feet as a recognized literature and it is highly significant that whatever may have been his radical ideas, he retained to the end the friendship and confidence of the Russian aristocratic writers far more than he did that of the liberals. Even Turgenev did not fail to look at him with some hesitation and the liberal critics utterly failed to understand his feelings of love and sympathy for Ukraine. On the other hand Apollon Grigoryev, one of the Slavophile critics, ranked him as a poet above both Pushkin and Mickiewicz. From his earliest writings Shevchenko was the bard of Ukraine. The fate of the Kozaks and the misfortunes of his unhappy people were constantly in his thoughts and in his early works, in accordance with the Romantic currents of the day, he idealized the life which they had lived, the stern and bitter conflicts which they had waged for independence and he glorified the _kobzars_, the folk bards, who alone preserved for posterity the memory of the heroic deeds of the Ukrainian past. That is the message of _Perebenda_, the poor old bard who wanders around homeless and neglected, singing of the great heroes of former days, singing wherever he can receive a few coins to eke out his miserable existence, and yet ever returning to the graves of the departed warriors to mourn over the fate of Ukraine. There was much in the old bard that can remind us of Shevchenko himself and of the role that he imagined for himself from his first steps in the art of writing. There have been many attempts to trace the literary origin of this type of the old peasant bard which was so widespread and common in Ukraine and the other Slavonic lands. Some have tried to find the model in Mickiewicz, in the poems of Pushkin, but perhaps after all, we can imagine without too much fancy that Shevchenko had heard from his teacher Bryulov, the friend of Sir Walter Scott, of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_. Those words at the beginning of the English poem, The way was long, the wind was cold, The minstrel was infirm and old. His withered cheek and tresses gray Seemed to have known a better day. The last of all the bards was he Who sang of border chivalry.