Romantic literature in English "fine feeling", displaying the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect. The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations. Among the most famous sentimental novels in English are Samuel Richardson's "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded" (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" (1759–67), "Sentimental Journey" (1768), Henry Brooke's "The Fool of Quality" (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie's "The Man of Feeling" (1771) and Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" (1800). Significant foreign influences were the Germans Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm Schlegel and French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman It is only in a Shandean spirit that my matter can be approached. I have to describe something as odd and whimsical as ever entered the brain of Sterne; and if I could, I would gladly lead you to the same affection for my father as you have for Tristram's. Christopher Morley, Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, wrote a preface to the Limited Edition Club issue of Sterne's classic. That preface appears in Morley's book "Streamlines" published by Doubleday - Doran in 1932, and is titled "Tristram Shandy". In the Hermann Hesse novel "The Journey to the East",