A man who has missed the fact that _Tristram Shandy is_ a game of digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not read _Tristram Shandy_ at all.

The man who objects to the Rossetti pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to their existing at all.

And any one who objects to Browning writing his huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning.

The essence of _The Ring and the Book_ is that it is the great epic of the nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous importance of small things.

The supreme difference that divides _The Ring and the Book_ from all the great poems of similar length and largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about affairs commonly called important, and _The Ring and the Book_ is about an affair commonly called contemptible.