le," by Longfellow and Lady Georgina
Fullerton. The elegant translation by Longfellow is so well known that
it is unnecessary to repeat it in the appendix to this volume. But a
few other translations of Jasmin's works have been given, to enable the
reader to form some idea of his poetical powers.

Although Jasmin's recitations of his poems were invariably received with
enthusiastic applause by his quick-spirited audiences in the South of
France, the story of his life will perhaps be found more attractive to
English readers than any rendering of his poems, however accurate, into
a language different from his own. For poetry, more than all forms
of literature, loses most by translation--especially from Gascon into
English. Villemain, one of the best of critics, says: "Toute traduction
en vers est une autre creation que l'original."

We proceed to give an account--mostly from his own Souvenirs--of the
early life and boyhood of Jasmin. The eighteenth century, old, decrepit,
and vicious, was about to come to an end, when in the corner of a little
room haunted by rats, a child, the subject of this story, was born. It
was on the morning of Shrove Tuesday, the 6th of March, 1798,--just as
the day had flung aside its black night-cap, and the morning sun was
about to shed its rays upon the earth,--that this son of a crippled
mother and a humpbacked tailor first saw the light. The child was
born in a house situated in one of the old streets of Agen--15 Rue
Fon-de-Rache--not far from the shop on the Gravier where Jasmin
afterwards carried on the trade of a barber and hairdresser.

"When a prince is born," said Jasmin in his Souvenirs, "his entrance
into the world is saluted with rounds of cannon, but when I, the son of
a poor tailor made my appearance, I was not saluted even with the sound
of a popgun." Yet Jasmin was afterwards to become a king of hearts! A
Charivari was, however, going on in front of a neighbour's door, as a
nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the
clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the
mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition
of the father of the child who had just been born.

Jacques Jasmin was only one child amongst many. The parents had
considerable difficulty in providing for the wants of the family, in
food as well as clothing. Besides the father's small earnings as a
tailor of the lowest standing, the mother occasi