The evening was closing, and the mist stealing over the Garonne, when we came alongside the pier at Agen. A troop of diligence _conducteurs_ and canal touters immediately leaped on board, to secure the passengers for Toulouse, either by road or water. Being, fortunately, not of the number who were thus taken prisoners, I walked up through the sultry evening--for we are now getting into the true south--to the very comfortable hotel looking upon the principal square of the town. One of my objects in stopping at Agen 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 _ménestrels_. 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 bravely up before an expectant assembly of perhaps a couple of thousand persons--the hot-blooded and quick-brained children of the South--the modern Troubadour plunges over head and ears into his lays, working both himself and his applauding audience into fits of enthusiasm and excitement, which, whatever may be the excellence of the poetry, an Englishman finds it difficult to conceive or account for. The raptures of the New Yorkers and Bostonians with Jenny Lind are weak and cold compared with the ovations which Jasmin has received. At a recitation given shortly before my visit at Auch, the ladies present actually tore the flowers and feathers out of their bonnets, wove them into extempore garlands, and flung them in showers upon the panting minstrel; while the editors of the local papers next morning assured him, in floods of flattering epigrams, that, humble as he was now, future ages would acknowledge the "divinity" of a Jasmin! There is a feature, however, about these recitations, which is still more extraordinary than the uncontrollable fits of popular enthusiasm which they produce. His last entertainment before I saw him was given in one of the Pyrenean cities (I forget which), and produced 2000 francs. Every sous of this went to the public charities; Jasmin will not accept a stiver of money so earned. With a species of perhaps overstrained, but certainly exalted, chivalric feeling, he declines to appear before an audience to exhibit for money the gifts with which nature has endowed him. After, perhaps, a brilliant tour through the South of France, delighting vast audiences in every city, and flinging many thousands of francs into every poor-box