I have been somewhat minute in giving an account of my interview with M. Jasmin, because he is really the popular poet--the peasant poet of the south of France--the Burns of Limousin, Provence, and Languedoc. His songs are in the mouths of all who sing in the fields and by the cottage firesides. Their subjects are always rural, _naive_, and full of rustic pathos and rustic drollery. To use his words to me, he sings what the hearts of the people say, and he can no more help it than can the birds in the trees. Translations into French of his main poems have appeared; and compositions more full of natural and thoroughly unsophisticated pathos and humour it would be difficult to find. Jasmin writes from a teeming brain and a beaming heart; and there is a warmth and a glow, and a strong, happy, triumphant march of song about his poems, which carry you away in the perusal as they carried away the author in the writing. I speak of course from the French translations, and I can well conceive that they give but a comparatively faint transcript of the pith and power of the original. The _patois_ in which these poems are written is the common peasant language of the south-west. It varies in some slight degree in different districts, but not more than the broad Scotch of Forfarshire differs from that of Ayrshire. As for the dialect itself, it seems in the main to be a species of cross between old French and Spanish--holding, however, I am assured, rather to the latter tongue than the former, and constituting a bold, copious, and vigorous speech, very rich in its colouring, full of quaint words and expressive phrases, and especially strong in all that relates to the language of the passions and affections. I hardly know how long my interview with Jasmin might have lasted, for he seemed by no means likely to tire of talking, and his talk was too good and too curious not to be listened to with interest; but the sister, who had left us for a moment, coming back with the intelligence that there was quite a gathering of customers in the shop, I hastily took my leave, the poet squeezing my hand like a vice, and immediately thereafter dashing into all that appertains to curling-irons, scissors, razors, and lather, with just as much apparent energy and enthusiasm as he flung into his rhapsodical discourse on poetry and language.