Yorick near-anagram of the Greek word 'Kyrios' and thus a reference to the Catholic martyr Edmund Campion. The name was used by Laurence Sterne in his comic novels "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey" as the surname of one of the characters, a parson who is a humorous portrait of the author. Parson Yorick is supposed to be descended from Shakespeare's Yorick. The earliest printed image of Hamlet holding Yorick's skull is a 1773 engraving by John Hall after a design by Edward Edwards in Bell's edition of Shakespeare's plays. It has since become a common subject. While Yorick normally only
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman the Books", and the Scriblerian collaborative work, "The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus". The shade of Cervantes is present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to Rocinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote in many ways) and Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humour", along with the genre-defying structure of "Tristram Shandy", which owes much to the second part of Cervantes' novel, all demonstrate the influence of Cervantes. The novel also makes use of John Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas"