ely 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, evoking both himself and his applauding audiences 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 to 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, and produced 2,000 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 which he passes, the poet contentedly returns
to his humble occupation, and to the little shop where he earns his
daily bread by his daily toil as a barber and hair-dresser. It will
be generally admitted that the man capable of self-denial of so truly
heroic a nature as this, is no ordinary poetaster.

"One would be puzzled to find a similar instance of perfect and absolute
disinterestedness in the roll of minstrels, from Homer downwards; and,
to tell the truth, there does seem a spice of Quixotism mingled with
and tinging the pure fervour of the enthusiast. Certain it is, that
the Troubadours of yore, upon whose model Jasmin professes to found his
poetry, were by no means so scrupulous. 'Largesse' was a very prominent
word in their vocabulary; and it really seems difficult to assign