those old ruins which still
embellish our landscape. But the tendency which is gradually effacing
the vestiges of our old language and customs is but the tendency of
civilisation itself.

"When Rome fell under the blows of the barbarians, she was entirely
conquered; her laws were subjected at the same time as her armies. The
conquest dismembered her idiom as well as her empire.... The last
trace of national unity disappeared in this country after the Roman
occupation. It had been Gaul, but now it became France. The force of
centralisation which has civilised Europe, covering this immense
chaos, has brought to light, after more than a hundred years, this most
magnificent creation the French monarchy and the French language. Let
us lament, if you will, that the poetical imagination and the
characteristic language of our ancestors have not left a more profound
impression. But the sentence is pronounced; even our Henry IV. could not
change it. Under his reign the Langue d'Oil became for ever the French
language, and the Langue d'Oc remained but a patois.

"Popular poet as you are, you sing to posterity in the language of the
past. This language, which you recite so well, you have restored and
perhaps even created; yet you do not feel that it is the national
language; this powerful instrument of a new era, which invades and
besieges yours on all sides like the last fortress of an obsolete
civilisation."

Jasmin was cut to the quick by this severe letter of his friend, and he
lost not a moment in publishing a defence of the language condemned to
death by his opponent. He even displayed the force and harmony of
the language which had been denounced by M. Dumon as a patois. He
endeavoured to express himself in the most characteristic and poetical
style, as evidence of the vitality of his native Gascon. He compared it
to a widowed mother who dies, and also to a mother who does not die,
but continues young, lovely, and alert, even to the last. Dumon had
published his protest on the 28th of August, 1837, and a few days later,
on the 2nd of September, Jasmin replied in the following poem:--

"There's not a deeper grief to man
Than when his mother, faint with years,
Decrepit, old, and weak and wan,
Beyond the leech's art appears;

When by her couch her son may stay,
And press her hand, and watch her eyes,
And feel, though she revives to-day,
Perchance his hope to-morrow dies.

It is not thus, believe me,