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.