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
Laurence Sterne a resurgence of a much older, Renaissance tradition of "Learned Wit" – owing a debt to such influences as the Scriblerian approach. "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" is a less influential book, although it was better received by English critics of the day. The book has many stylistic parallels with "Tristram Shandy", and indeed, the narrator is one of the minor characters from the earlier novel. Although the story is more straightforward, "A Sentimental Journey" can be understood to be part of the same artistic project to which "Tristram Shandy" belongs. Two volumes of Sterne's "Sermons" were published