asmin takes especial
delight, he is not blind, as some are, to excellence in high places. All
he seeks is the sterling and the real. He recognises the sparkle of the
diamond as well as that of the dewdrop. But he will not look upon paste.

"He is thus pre-eminently the poet of nature; not, be it understood, of
inanimate nature only, but of nature also, as it exists in our thoughts,
and words, and acts of nature as it is to be found living and moving in
humanity. But we cannot paint him so well as he paints himself. We well
remember how, in his little shop at Agen, he described to us what he
believed to be characteristic of his poetry; and we find in a letter
from him to M. Leonce de Lavergne the substance of what he then said to
us:

"'I believe,' he said, 'that I have portrayed a part of the noble
sentiments which men and women may experience here below. I believe
that I have emancipated myself more than anyone has ever done from
every school, and I have placed myself in more direct communication with
nature. My poetry comes from my heart. I have taken my pictures from
around me in the most humble conditions of men; and I have done for my
native language all that I could.'"

A few years later Mr. Angus B. Reach, a well-known author, and a
contributor to Punch in its earlier days, was appointed a commissioner
by the Morning Chronicle to visit, for industrial purposes, the
districts in the South of France. His reports appeared in the Chronicle;
but in 1852, Mr. Reach published a fuller account of his journeys in a
volume entitled 'Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone.'{6}
In passing through the South of France, Mr. Reach stopped at Agen.
"One of my objects," he says, "was to pay a literary visit to a very
remarkable man--Jasmin, the peasant-poet of Provence and Languedoc--the
'Last of the Troubadours,' as, with more truth than is generally to be
found in ad captandum designations, he terms himself, and is termed by
the wide circle of his admirers; for Jasmin's songs and rural epics are
written in the patois of the people, and that patois is the still almost
unaltered Langue d'Oc--the tongue of the chivalric minstrelsy of yore.

"But Jasmin is a Troubadour in another sense than that of merely
availing himself of the tongue of the menestrels. He publishes,
certainly, conforming so far to the usages of our degenerate modern
times; but his great triumphs are his popular recitations of his poems.
Standing brav