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.
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