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 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Pedants and commonplace-fellows like Dr.J." The young Karl Marx was a devotee of "Tristram Shandy", and wrote a still-unpublished short humorous novel, "Scorpion and Felix", that was obviously influenced by Sterne's work.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