Picaresque novel can simply refer to an episodic recounting of the adventures of an anti-hero on the road. Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" (1761-1767) and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" (1768) each have strong picaresque elements. Voltaire's French novel "Candide" (1759) contains elements of the picaresque. An interesting variation on the tradition of the picaresque is "The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan" (1824), a satirical view on early 19th-century Persia, written by a British diplomat, James Morier. Elements of the picaresque novel are found in Charles Dickens’s "The Pickwick Papers" (1836–37). Gogol occasionally used
John Hall-Stevenson and Devonshire" (1763), "A Pastoral Puke; a second Sermon preached before the people called Whigs; by an Independent" (1764), "Makarony Fables, with the new Fable of the Bees" (1767), "Lyric Consolations, with the Speech of Alderman Wilkes delivered in a Dream" (1768) and "An Essay upon the King's Friends" (1776). Hall-Stevenson gave some financial support to his friend Sterne, who often visited him at Skelton, and they liked to race chariots over the sands at Saltburn, and Hall-Stevenson appears under the name of "Eugenius" in Sterne's novels "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy". This was unfinished