It is interesting to observe all the steps of the somewhat intricate process by which the first great modern critic was prepared for the exercise of his vocation. At the time when the Romantic circle was broken up by the Revolution of July, Sainte-Beuve stood on such good terms with the Legitimist leaders that Polignac was on the point of offering him the post of secretary to Lamartine, who was then about to proceed as ambassador to Greece. It was a post which the young poet would have had no objection to accept from them; hence he involuntarily cherished a certain feeling of resentment against the new government, under which almost all his literary friends received political preferment. The democratic element which lay latent in his character (he gave up the _de_ which he was entitled to prefix to his name), proclaimed itself; he became a species of interpreter of the naïvely ardent socialistic philosopher, Pierre Leroux, and continued to write in the _Globe_ even after it had passed from the hands of the Romantic dogmatists into those of the Saint-Simonists, and was appearing as their organ, with the motto: _À chacun selon sa vocation à chaque vocation selon ses œuvres_. Like Heine, he had an enthusiastic admiration for Père Enfantin; and in an article written in 1831 he ranks the religious writings of Saint-Simon high above Lessing's _Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts_. Hardly had he separated from the Saint-Simonists, after the break-up of their "family" in 1832, than he entered into relations with Armand Carrel, the literary chief of Republican France. Although Sainte-Beuve, in the article he wrote on Carrel in 1852, ignores his own close connection with him, it is quite certain that he wrote in Carrel's paper, the _National_, for three years, and on political as well as literary subjects. He enrolled himself among the Republicans, and made acquaintance with them, as he had previously done with the Saint-Simonists, the Romanticists, and the Legitimists. And it was about this same time that his friend, Ampère, procured him admission to the circle of the Abbaye des Bois, where the venerable Madame Récamier reigned and Chateaubriand was worshipped. After a quarrel with Carrel on the subject of an article on Ballanche, which Carrel considered too favourable to Legitimacy, Sainte-Beuve allied himself with Lamennais, who had made overtures of friendship. What attracted him to Lamennais, whose confidant and adviser he soon became, was partly that great churchman's sincere and ardent devotion to the people, partly sympathy with his main theory, that it was necessary, in order to keep the steadily rising stream of democracy within its banks, to oppose to its powerful, and to a certain extent irrefutable, principle one still more powerful, namely, the religious principle, which addressed itself with authority to the people, and with no less authority to their kings. So strongly did Lamennais' attitude before his defection from the