The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman of the slave trade. "That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many — but if only one — Gracious God! — what a feast to a benevolent heart!" he wrote. In July 1766 Sancho's letter was received by Reverend Laurence Sterne shortly after he had just finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in "Tristram Shandy", wherein Tom described the oppression of a black servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon, which he had visited. Laurence Sterne's widely publicised 27 July 1766 response to Sancho's letter became
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to the morality of dancing schools. Much of the singularity of "Tristram Shandy's" characters is drawn from Burton. Burton indulges himself in a Utopian sketch of a perfect government in his introductory address to the reader, and this forms the basis of the notions of "Tristram Shandy" on the subject. And Sterne parodies Burton's use of weighty quotations. The first four chapters of "Tristram Shandy" are founded on some passages in Burton. In Chapter 3, Volume 5, Sterne parodies the genre of "consolatio", mixing and reworking passages from three "widely separated sections" of Burton's "Anatomy", including a parody of Burton's