One expected figure of a different kind may perhaps have been hitherto missed in this part of our gallery. Sterne’s well-known outburst as to criticism, in the twelfth chapter of the third book of _Tristram Shandy_, is far too famous a thing to be passed over with the mere allusion given to it in the last volume, or with another in this. Nay, it may be said at once, from its fame and from its forcible expression, to have had, and even in a sense still to have, no small place among the Dissolvents of Judgment by Rule. “Looking only at the stop-watch” is one of those admirable and consummate _phrases_ which settle themselves once for all in the human memory, and not merely possess—as precisians complain, illegitimately—the force of an argument, but have a property of self-preservation and recurrence at the proper moment in which arguments proper are too often sadly lacking. Further, it must be admitted that there are few better instances of the combined sprightliness and ingenuity of Sterne’s humour. “Befetiched with the bobs and trinkets of criticism” is in reality even happier than the “stop-watch,” and of an extraordinary propriety. Though he did “fetch it from the coast of Guinea,” nothing was ever less far-fetched or more home-driven. The “nothing of the colouring of Titian” is equally happy in its rebuke of the singular _negativeness_—the attention to what is _not_ there, not to what is—of Neo-Classicism; while the outburst, again world-known, as to the “tormenting cant of criticism,” and the ingenious and thoroughly English application of this cant itself to the eulogy of the curse of Ernulphus, are all too delightful, and have been too effective for good, not to deserve the heartiest acknowledgment.