Sainte-Beuve was not infrequently seized with an amiable and very convenient fancy for constructing small retrospective guides and clues to the mighty maze of his fifty or sixty volumes of critical essays. The most definite and important, written in September 1861, just at the beginning of the _Nouveaux Lundis_, and appended to the second volume of the Garnier edition of _Portraits Littéraires_, distributes his whole career under heads. First comes his novitiate in the _Globe_ up to 1827; then the Romantic campaign of the _Ronsard_, the _Tableau du Seizième Siècle_, and the articles of 1828-29; then the nearly twenty years’ stretch of his contributions (preserved in the _Portraits Littéraires_ themselves and the _Portraits Contemporains_) to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, with _Port-Royal_ as a solid cut-and-come-again accompaniment; then _Chateaubriand et son Groupe_; then the _Causeries du Lundi_ properly so called, and, lastly, the series which he was beginning as he wrote. The work of the first period of which he speaks with some disdain—_ce ne sont que des essais sans importance_—he never actually republished; but towards the end of his life he repented and intended to do so, and such part of it as could be recovered appeared posthumously, with a good many waifs and strays of other kinds, as _Premiers Lundis_. If to these we add the _Étude sur Virgile_[568] and perhaps the _P. J. Proudhon_,[569] we shall nearly have exhausted his available stores, and quite, I think, those of critical interest.[570] [Sidenote: _The earlier articles._]