IT HAS LONG STRUCK ME AS PECULIAR THAT RAYMOND WILLIAMS, OUR great political philologist of British culture and society in longue duree, did not include or in his encyclopedia of keywords. This omission becomes especially odd when you consider that one of conceptual payoffs of his critical project notion of structures of feeling. (1) Traditional philological work on emergence of term sentimental traces it to late 1740S. There is no doubt, however, that from 1750S word routinely associated with a new way of producing narrative, nor that by 1768, when Sterne coined a new phrase for A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, this massively influential work, together with book to which it a sequel, established term and mode on a lasting footing. Jean-Claude Gorjy's Sternean effort, Le Nouveau voyage sentimental (1784) just one of many books so titled in France. One measure of novelty of term sentimental in 1768, however, is that when a German writer attempted to translate it into German, he had to coin a new word in German--empfindsam--to capture English neologism. This philology has been pretty well worked out by a number of scholars. (2) There has been some attention paid to implications of emergence of sentimental in literary and dramatic contexts for issues of what might be called probability, Aristotelian question of how to understand cause and effect in rendering of a world. (3) But again, what has been less thoroughly worked out is political dimension of this new or newly recognized mode, though there have been some promising efforts. (4) For example, question is taken up in one of most carefully argued and persuasively detailed books on Romanticism and politics in recent years--John Barrell's Imagining King's Death--which opens with an account of role played by what Barrell calls the language of sentiment in shaping responses to upheavals of mid-1790s. (5) For Barrell, this language a primary medium in which scenes from 1793 execution of Louis xvI, especially final interview with his family, were represented in Britain. It a medium, Barrel] stresses, with effects all its own, effects that turn out to be hard to control, and in ways that prove crucial to his argument. His subject is unfolding of notorious treason trials in 1794-95, when Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, John Thelwall and Thomas Holcroft were accused of violating a medieval statute of 1351 that made it a capital offense to King's death. Barrell shows how sentimentally enhanced capacity of English to imagine actual of deceased French king made it easier for them to imagine possible of their own king, George Third, and thus to accuse others of doing so treasonously. Perhaps central player in Barrell's brilliantly recounted narrative is Edmund Burke, who had, a month before French regicide, already warned his colleagues in House of Commons that agents were at large in Britain who might perhaps be commissioned to murder British royal family with daggers purpose-made in Birmingham (where Priestley had recently been burned out). Burke punctuated his remarks, as registered in Parliamentary History and several contemporary caricatures, by producing a dagger from his own coat and hurling it down on floor of house. Of all loyalists, writes Barrell, Burke was fondest of extreme rhetorical effects which could be achieved by inviting his audience in parliament, and his readers outside, to join him in thrills, terror, tears provoked by imagining king's death (87). Burke mobilizing rhetorical resources he had notoriously developed in his Reflections on Revolution in France (1790), which ignited great British controversy over French Revolution. …