Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the women off with a clean brush: but the quality of liveness pertains to them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing degree.
"The English Novel"
George Saintsbury
"I know, I know," Mabel hastened to put herself right with him: "what I mean to say is I shouldn't wonder if they're only visible when you're invisible-the liveness of them, I mean, not the stoniness."
"The Enchanted Castle"
E. Nesbit