rendering of his poems, however accurate, into a language
different from his own. For poetry, more than all forms of
literature, loses most by translation--especially from Gascon
into English. Villemain, one of the best of critics, says:
"Toute traduction en vers est une autre creation que l'original."

We proceed to give an account--mostly from his own Souvenirs
--of the early life and boyhood of Jasmin. The eighteenth
century, old, decrepit, and vicious, was about to come to an
end, when in the corner of a little room haunted by rats, a
child, the subject of this story, was born. It was on the
morning of Shrove Tuesday, the 6th of March, 1798,--just as
the day had flung aside its black night-cap, and the morning sun
was about to shed its rays upon the earth,--that this son of a
crippled mother and a humpbacked tailor first saw the light.
The child was born in a house situated in one of the old streets
of Agen--15 Rue Fon-de-Rache--not far from the shop on the
Gravier where Jasmin afterwards carried on the trade of a barber
and hairdresser.

"When a prince is born," said Jasmin in his Souvenirs,
"his entrance into the world is saluted with rounds of cannon,
but when I, the son of a poor tailor made my appearance, I was
not saluted even with the sound of a popgun." Yet Jasmin was
afterwards to become a king of hearts! A Charivari was, however,
going on in front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade
on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of
horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the
mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the
composition of the father of the child who had just been born.