Augustan prose other novelists should be mentioned, for they, like Fielding and Richardson, were in dialog through their works. Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett held a personal dislike for one another, and their works similarly offered up oppositional views of the self in society and the method of the novel. Laurence Sterne was a clergyman, and he consciously set out to imitate Jonathan Swift with his "Tristram Shandy" (1759–1767). "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman" was a stylistic and formal revolution for the novel. Like Swift's satires, it begins with radical skepticism and a willingness to break apart figurative language
USS Tristram Shandy (1864) of the devastated fallen Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Two days later, the ship moored at Baltimore, Maryland, where the admiral was greeted with the sad news that the President had been assassinated the previous night in Washington. On 26 April, the ship returned to Hampton Roads to continue her duties as a dispatch vessel, operating off the Virginia Capes, concurrently serving as a lookout and keeping watch for the Confederate ram , believed to be still at sea and unaware that hostilities had ceased. "Tristram Shandy" then conveyed Confederate prisoners of war to Fort Pulaski, Georgia, in late May