He came just before the end of a series of almost imperceptible changes in ordinary English speech which brought about something like a stationary state.

His maligner and only slightly younger contemporary, Horace Walpole, in some of his letters, writes in a fashion which, putting mere slang aside, has hardly any difference from that of to-day.

Fielding still uses "hath" for "has" and a few other things which seem archaic, not to students of literature but to the general.

In the same way dress, manners, etc., though much more picturesque, were by that fact distinguished from those of almost the whole nineteenth century and the twentieth as far as it has gone: while incidents were, even in ordinary life, still usual which have long ceased to be so.

In this way the immense advance--greater than was made by any one else till Miss Austen--that he made in the pure novel of this ordinary life may be missed.