sets the tone of _Perebenda_ far better than do all the mystical and prophetic bards that have been invoked as models. We have an indirect support of this in the preface of the second _Kobzar_ of 1847, when Shevchenko says that the Russians point to the fact that Scott did not write in his own language, but “he was born in Edinburgh and not in Scotland.... And Burns was also a great national poet.” The pathos of the last minstrel, as Scott draws him, is close to the message of _Perebenda_, but Shevchenko adapts him perfectly to the Ukrainian scene. There is less of the beautiful romance about the Ukrainian situation. There is a deeper sadness and a deeper pathos, as the burden upon the lower classes was heavier and more intolerable. Scott described a situation of two centuries before and conditions had changed and mellowed with the passing of time. Shevchenko, the freed serf, was thinking of the life which he had once personally known and of the battles in which there had participated men whom he had known in Ukraine. In the _Kobzar_, he laid his main emphasis on the struggles between the Kozaks and the Poles. Moscow and the Russians play a subordinate part, for after all Shevchenko was from the right bank of the Dnieper where the bloody Kozak wars against the Poles had been fought in the preceding centuries. The only poem that describes the relations with the Russians is _Katerina_, the story of the young girl who has a child by a Russian officer who has seduced her and then cast her off. When she finally overtakes him, he is unwilling to recognize her or his child. This social theme was to grow in importance as Shevchenko matured, but it rests upon his observation of the present rather than his regard for the past. The _Kobzar_ marked an epoch in modern Ukrainian literature. For the first time a poet had arisen to pour out his heart in his native tongue and to express the sufferings of his people and their past. Shevchenko was not like the earlier authors who had developed Ukrainian but who had also worked extensively in Russian. He did very little in the Russian language and even that little belongs to the most unimportant part of his work. He was a Ukrainian first, last, and always and he never was attracted by any of the compromises that were so convenient and popular. The next year saw the publication of the _Haydamaki_, the greatest poem of Shevchenko and the masterpiece of Ukrainian epic poetry. It goes back to the last struggles in Western Ukraine in the eighteenth century, to the last uprising of the peasants and the Kozaks in a futile attempt to secure relief from their Polish masters. His grandfather had told him stories of this struggle, the Koliivshchina, which spread fire and sword through part of Ukraine in 1768, and in the poem Shevchenko reworked these legends on the basis of eye-witness accounts. As he says: