d in his honour, in
which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized
version of his _Mireio_ was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a
striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the
Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might
feel, from his mouldering palace hard by.

In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom,
every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the
progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how
it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old
square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the
street. Sang a very different poet--

They grind us to the dust with poverty,
And build us statues when we come to die.

But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil,"
and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in
daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater
contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old
Sylvanus and the sister nymphs--as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has
been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than
Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian
admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called "the Homer of Provence"--as Virgilian,
too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon,
we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been
on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way
from Marseilles to Tarascon.

Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page
of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain,
with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate,
tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background
of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing
water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there
with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet--here
and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly
sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage--and far aloft in
the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of
Mont Ventoux--the Fuji Yama of Provence.

At last the old, time-worn village came in sight--it lies about ten
miles north-east of Tartarin'