The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman in permanent additions to the English lexicon; within the text of "Tristram Shandy" Sterne describes the novel as "Shandean," coining a term which still carries the meaning that Sterne originally attached to it when he wrote, "I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good humoured "Shandean" book..." Strongly influenced by Cervantes' "Don Quixote", Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" also gave rise to the term "cervantic," (which Sterne at the time spelled "cervantick"). In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Ignatius Sancho wrote to Laurence Sterne encouraging the writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman even approached his publisher F.A. Brockhaus offering to translate it into German (an offer which Brockhaus rejected). Samuel Johnson in 1776 commented, "Nothing odd will do long. "Tristram Shandy" did not last." Schopenhauer privately rebutted Samuel Johnson, saying: "The man Sterne is worth 1,000 Pedants and commonplace-fellows like Dr.J." The young Karl Marx was a devotee of "Tristram Shandy", and wrote a still-unpublished short humorous novel, "Scorpion and Felix", that was obviously influenced by Sterne's work. Goethe praised Sterne in "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years", which in turn influenced Nietzsche. "Tristram Shandy" has also been seen by formalists and other literary