For anyone who knows Neil Hertz, a great raconteur with an ironic sense of humor, a man of people, able to talk to anyone, he seems a most unlikely theorist of sublime, in line of Longinus, Burke, and Kant. Longinus and Burke display an unbounded admiration for moments of elevation, in expression and nature-not so Hertz. Neither they nor Kant is notable for a sense of humor, and they are all quite snooty about low or trivial. use of trivial words, writes Longinus, terribly disfigures passages in grand style (154). But moments of incongruity that provoke and dismay Longinus are precisely what capture Hertz's attention, and his best stories are likely to have as a punch line something incongruous that somebody said. For Longinus sublimity comes from nobility of soul and manifests itself in elevated language. Hertz, au contraire, is suspicious of those moments when the language rises, as he puts it in The End of Line (62). He has a nose for precisely those moments of tonal heightening, which attract his critical eye and reveal special investments, something suspicious going on-by contrast with moments of less inflated language. It is notjust Hertz raconteur who savors deflation produced by vulgar or overly familiar but also Hertz critic. In Recognizing Casaubon, an essay whose centrality for his work is marked by fact that it appears in George Eliot's Pulse as well as in The End of Line, opening page considers a passage where Eliot asks Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out glory of world and leave