pranked out, and polished, and muscadined--until, for all honest purposes of true high poetry, it was mere unavailable and contemptible jargon.

"It might do for cheating agents de change on the Bourse--for squabbling politicians in the Chambers-- for mincing dandies in the salons--for the sarcasm of Scribe-ish comedies, or the coarse drolleries of Palais Royal farces, but for poetry the French language was extinct. All modern poets who used it were faiseurs de phrase--thinking about words and not feelings. 'No, no,' my Troubadour continued, 'to write poetry, you must get the language of a rural people--a language talked among fields, and trees, and by rivers and mountains--a language never minced or disfigured by academies and dictionary-makers, and journalists; you must have a language like that which your own Burns, whom I read of in Chateaubriand, used; or like the brave, old, mellow tongue--unchanged for centuries--stuffed with the strangest, quaintest, richest, raciest idioms and odd solemn words, full of shifting meanings and associations, at once pathetic and familiar, homely and graceful--the language which I write in, and which has never yet been defiled by calculating men of science or jack-a-dandy littérateurs.' "The above sentences may be taken as a specimen of the ideas with which Jasmin seemed to be actually overflowing from every pore in his body--so rapid, vehement, and loud was his enunciation of them. Warming more and more as he went on, he began to sketch the outlines of his favourite pieces. Every now and then plunging into recitation, jumping from French into patois, and from patois into French, and sometimes spluttering them out, mixed up pell-mell together. Hardly pausing to take breath, he rushed about the shop as he discoursed, lugging out, from old chests and drawers, piles of old newspapers and reviews, pointing out a passage here in which the estimate of the writer pleased him, a passage there which showed how perfectly the critic had mistaken the scope of his poetic philosophy, and exclaiming, with the most perfect naivéte, how mortifying it was for men of original and profound genius to be misconceived and misrepresented by pigmy whipper- snapper scamps of journalists.

"There was one review of his works, published in a London 'Recueil,' as he called it, to which Jasmin referred with great pleasure. A portion of it had been translated, he said, in the preface to a French edition of his works; and he had most of the highly complimentary phrases by heart. The English critic, he said, wrote in the Tintinum, and he looked dubiously at me when I confessed that I had never heard of the organ in question. 'Pourtant,' he said, 'je vous le ferai voir,' and I soon perceived that Jasmin's Tintinum was no other than the Athenaeum!

"In the little back drawing-room behind the shop, to which the poet speedily introduced me, his sister [it must have been his wife], a meek, smiling woman, whose eyes never left him, following as he moved with a beautiful expression of love and pride in his glory, received me with simple cordiality. The walls were covered with testimonials, presentations, and trophies, awarded by critics and distinguished persons, literary and political, to the modern Troubadour. Not a few of these are of a nature to make any man most legitimately proud. Jasmin possesses gold and silver vases, laurel branches, snuff-boxes, medals of honour, and a whole museum of similar gifts, inscribed with such characteristic and laconic legends as 'Au Poète, Les Jeunes filles de Toulouse reconnaissantes!' &c.

"The number of garlands of immortelles, wreaths of ivy-jasmin (punning upon the name), laurel, and so forth, utterly astonished me. Jasmin preserved a perfect shrubbery of such tokens; and each symbol had, of course, its pleasant associative remembrance. One was given by the ladies of such a town; another was the gift of the prefect's wife of such a department. A handsome full-length portrait had been presented to the poet by the municipal authorities of Agen; and a letter from M. Lamartine, framed, above the chimney- piece, avowed the writer's belief that the Troubadour of the Garonne was the Homer of the modern world. M. Jasmin wears the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and has several valuable presents which were made to him by the late ex-king and different members of the Orleans family.

"I have been somewhat minute in giving an account of my interview with M. Jasmin, because he is really the popular poet --the peasant poet of the South of France--the Burns of Limousin, Provece, and Languedoc. His songs are in the mouths of all who sing in the fields and by the cottage firesides. Their subjects are always rural, naive, and full of rustic pathos and rustic drollery. To use his words to me, he sings what