to invent and observe--except,
indeed, in the most negative of senses--any style of his own. The
"style of Sterne," in short, is as though one should say "the form
of Proteus." He was determined to be uniformly eccentric, regularly
irregular, and that was all. His digressions, his asides, and his
fooleries in general would, of course, have in any case necessitated
a certain general jerkiness of manner; but this need hardly have
extended itself habitually to the structure of individual sentences,
and as a matter of fact he can at times write, as he does for the most
part in his _Sermons_, in a style which is not the less vigorous for
being fairly correct. But as a rule his mode of expressing himself is
destitute of any pretensions to precision; and in many instances it
is a perfect marvel of literary slipshod. Nor is there any ground for
believing that the slovenliness was invariably intentional. Sterne's
truly hideous French--French at which even Stratford-atte-Bowe would
have stood aghast--is in itself sufficient evidence of a natural
insensibility to grammatical accuracy. Here there can be no suspicion
of designed defiance of rules; and more than one solecism of rather
a serious kind in his use of English words and phrases affords
confirmatory testimony to the same point. His punctuation is fearful
and wonderful, even for an age in which the _rationale_ of punctuation
was more imperfectly understood than it is at present; and this,
though an apparently slight matter, is not without value as an
indication of ways of thought. But if we can hardly describe Sterne's
style as being in the literary sense a style at all, it has a very
distinct _colloquial_ character of its own, and as such it is nearly
as much deserving of praise as from the literary point of view it is
open to exception. Chaotic as it is in the syntactical sense, it is
a perfectly clear vehicle for the conveyance of thought: we are as
rarely at a loss for the meaning of one of Sterne's sentences as we
are, for very different reasons, for the meaning of one of Macaulay's.
And his language is so full of life and colour, his tone so animated
and vivacious, that we forget we are reading and not _listening_, and
we are as little disposed to be exacting in respect to form as though
we were listeners in actual fact. Sterne's manner, in short, may
be that of a bad and careless writer, but it is the manner of a
first-rate talker; and this, of course, enhances rather