The earliest detachment of this great army, as presented in that _régiment de marche_ the _Premiers Lundis_ (made up of all sort of things from these raw recruits to the poor old veterans of Senate-speech more than forty years later), might deserve their author’s modest or merciless sentence from the severe point of view of his greatest pupil. They are certainly not “chief and principal things” in themselves. Sainte-Beuve was very young (barely twenty) when he began to write them, and, as we have said, it is nearly impossible for a very young critic to be a very good critic, though it is deplorably possible for a rather old one to be more than rather bad. Some of them are so short as to give no room for much display of individual and original talent. Sometimes they deal with things ephemeral, and now forgotten, in a merely journalist fashion. Sometimes, as in the dealing with Scott’s _Napoleon_, inevitable and insuperable prejudices and preoccupations come in. One may even admit frankly that, _nonnunquam_, there are symptoms which lead one to understand, after a fashion, the charges of dulness[571] and of _galimatias_ which were brought against Sainte-Beuve by persons from Balzac[572] downwards, and which have sometimes seemed mere spiteful lunacy to readers of the _Causeries_ at their most brilliant period only. But to the expert there is unmistakable and not merely fancied _quality_ even here. There is already the indefinable, but in previous critics so unfortunately rare, desire to appreciate, to understand. There is almost always a sober judgment; not seldom a delicate if rather tentative subtlety. Above all, there are signs of something very different from the sham omniscience which is such a temptation to the young reviewer,—of a range and width of reading, classical, modern, foreign, most surprising and most unusual at the time. The _Tableau_,[573] with its associated selection of Ronsard, and some other matter appended to its later editions, is quite a landmark in French literary history. It turned (or rather marked the turning of) the tide in regard to sixteenth-century literature, interested the youth of the day in the _Pléiade_, stimulated the new prosodical movements, did much else. But its author’s powers were immature: and there is not a great deal of the highest critical importance in its individual utterances and judgments. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the statement in the _Preface_ that “L’Art consacre et purifie tout ce qu’il touche”—a companion axiom to the Preface of the _Orientales_, which neither critic nor poet would have fully indorsed in their later days, though many of their followers would. [Sidenote: Portraits Littéraires _and_ Portraits de Femmes.]