Single books, like Morier's _Hajji Baba_ (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.