(1824), Hope’s Anastasius (1819), Croly’s Salathiel (1829), gained fame which they have not quite lost:  and the little known Michael Scott (1789-1835) left in Tom Cringle’s Log and The Cruise of the Midge a pair of stories of West Indian scenery and adventure which are nearly first rate.  In 1839, not long after Pickwick, Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year blended Bulwer and Dickens in a manner which to this day is a puzzle in its near approach to success.  Yet he never repeated this approach, though he had earlier done striking things in the Diary of a Late Physician (1830).  But in the latest thirties and early forties there arose two writers who were to eclipse every one of their contemporaries in this kind.

The remarkable originality and idiosyncrasy of Dickens have perhaps, to some extent and from not a few persons, concealed the fact that he was not, any more than other people, an earth-born wonder.  Scanted of education as he was, he has in several places frankly and eagerly confessed his early acquaintance with the great older novelists, and his special fancy for Smollett—­whose influence indeed is traceable on him from first to last, and not least in the famous “interiors” of which he made far more than his example had done.  Even in Pickwick the expert will trace suggestions from others.  But if the work is read in its proper order, and the Sketches by Boz are taken first, nobody who knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook will fail to see that Dickens owed a great deal to both.  The fact is in no sense discreditable to him:  on the contrary, it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and critical judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none.  The earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never for very much.  The genius who fastens on the points in preceding literature most congenial to him, develops them, builds on them with his own matter and form, and turns out something far greater than his originals is the really satisfactory person.  Had Leigh Hunt lent to Hook his literature, his fund of trivial but agreeable observation and illustration, and his attractive style; had Hook communicated to Hunt his narrative faculty and his fecundity in character and manners:—­neither could have written Pickwick or even the worst of its successors.  Had there been no Hunt and no Hook, Dickens would no doubt have managed, in some fashion, to “do for himself.”  But it would have given him more trouble, he would have done it more slowly, and he would hardly have earned that generous and admirable phrase of his greatest contemporary in fiction which will be quoted shortly.