And yet laboriously figured, tricked, machined as it is--easy as once more it may be to prove that it is artifice and not art--the fact remains that, not merely (perhaps not by any means chiefly) in the stock extract-pieces which everybody knows, but almost everywhere, it is triumphant: and that English literature would be seriously impoverished without it.

Certainly never was there a style which more fully justified the definition given by Buffon, in Sterne's own time, of style as "the _very_ man." Falsetto, "faking," vamping, shoddy--all manner of evil terms may be heaped upon it without the possibility of completely clearing it from them.

To some eyes it underlies them most when it is most ambitious, as in the Le Fevre story and the diatribe against critics.

It leaves the court with all manner of stains on its character.

Only, once more, if it did not exist we should be ignorant of more than one of the most remarkable possibilities of the English language.
Thus, in almost exactly the course of a technical generation--from the appearance of _Pamela_ in 1740 to that of _Humphry Clinker_ in 1771--the wain of the novel was solidly built, furnished with four main wheels to move it, and set a-going to travel through the centuries.