afterwards return to the subject.

Endnotes to Chapter VIII.

{1} Mr. George Dolby, in his work 'Charles Dickens as I knew him,'
tells "the story of the famous 'reading tours,' the most brilliantly
successful enterprises that were ever undertaken." Chappell and Co. paid
him 1500 sterling for thirty readings in London and the provinces, by
which they realised 5000 sterling. Arthur Smith and Mr. Headland were
his next managers, and finally Mr. George Dolby. The latter says that
Mr. Dickens computed the money he netted under the Smith and Headland
management at about 12,000 sterling; and under Dolby's management "he
cleared nearly 33,000 sterling."

{2} In Gascon: "Las carreros diouyon fleuri,
Tan gran poete bay sourti;
Diouyon fleuri, diouyon graua,
Tan gran poete bay passa."

CHAPTER IX. JASMIN'S 'FRANCONNETTE.'

Jasmin published no further poems for three or four years. His time was
taken up with his trade and his philanthropic missions. Besides, he
did not compose with rapidity; he elaborated his poems by degrees; he
arranged the plot of his story, and then he clothed it with poetical
words and images. While he walked and journeyed from place to place, he
was dreaming and thinking of his next dramatic poem--his Franconnette,
which many of his critics regard as his masterpiece.

Like most of his previous poems, Jasmin wrote Franconnette in the Gascon
dialect. Some of his intimate friends continued to expostulate with
him for using this almost dead and virtually illiterate patois. Why not
write in classical French? M. Dumon, his colleague at the Academy
of Agen, again urged him to employ the national language, which all
intelligent readers could understand.

"Under the reign of our Henry IV.," said M. Dumon, "the Langue d'Oil
became, with modifications, the language of the French, while the Langue
d'Oc remained merely a patois. Do not therefore sing in the dialect of
the past, but in the language of the present, like Beranger, Lamartine,
and Victor Hugo.

"What," asked M. Dumon, "will be the fate of your original poetry? It
will live, no doubt, like the dialect in which it is written; but
is this, the Gascon patois, likely to live? Will it be spoken by our
posterity as long as it has been spoken by our ancestors? I hope not;
at least I wish it may be less spoken. Yet I love its artless and
picturesque expressions, its lively recollections of customs and manners
which have long ceased to exist, like