Early in 1827 Sainte-Beuve published in the _Globe_ two articles on Victor Hugo's _Odes et Ballades_, which procured him admission to the Romanticist circle. Hugo came to thank him, but did not find him at home. A few days later Sainte-Beuve returned the call. He found Hugo and his wife at breakfast, and thus made at the same moment the acquaintance of the two persons who were to have most influence over his life for many years to come. He soon became the accredited critic of the Romantic School. His first important task was to prove the connection of the new school with the older French literature, to provide it, so to speak, with Gallic ancestors. This task he accomplished in his excellent critical work, _Tableau de la Poésie française au XVIe Siècle_ (1827-28), the aim of which is to show plainly the thread which stretches across the classical age and connects the generation of 1830 with Ronsard, Du Bellay, Philippe des Portes, and those other authors of the Renaissance who had been so long and so unjustly despised. This book occupies the same position among Sainte-Beuve's works that _Les Grotesques_ does among Théophile Gautier's. It was written before _Les Grotesques_, and is as thorough and critically discriminating as Gautier's work is plastic and eccentric. In 1829 followed Sainte-Beuve's first lyric essay, _Poésies de Joseph Delorme_, a collection of curious, elaborate poems which made no small sensation. They purported to be written by a young medical student who had died of consumption; but in the preface, under the transparent pseudonym, Sainte-Beuve described himself and his own life. Joseph Delorme is of the race of Obermann--poor, gifted, full of compassion for the woes of humanity, a lustreless genius like the founder of the race, but of even a more complex character than he; for Joseph is a philosopher who is unhappy because of his scepticism, an idealist who with all his idealism is addicted to low dissipation. The hero is the usual despairing youth of the 1830 period, but there is more of the bourgeois in him than in the heroes of Saint-Beuve's contemporaries; his despair is less magnificent and more true to nature. As regards form, the poems are remarkable for their return to the charming old French metres of Ronsard and Charles d'Orléans, and also for the frequency with which the sonnet (beloved of Sainte-Beuve as of Wilhelm Schlegel) recurs. But they interest us chiefly because of the tendency to realism which their author already begins to display, a realism which, though it can sometimes be traced to the influence of the English poets of the Lake School, is yet as a rule, with its daring choice of subjects (in the poem "Rose" for example), original and essentially French. The ideal element is represented by the author's ecstatic effusions on the subject of the _Cénacle_, the little fraternal circle of poets and painters into which he had lately been admitted, and the members of which he panegyrises, now collectively,