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
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"