filled with
privates and non-commissioned officers to follow the leaders. Gait and
Moir carried out the "Scotch novel" with something of Scott, but more of
Smollett (Gait at least certainly, in part of his work, preceded Scott).
Lady Morgan, who has been mentioned already, Banim, Crofton Croker, and
others played a similar part to Miss Edgeworth. Glascock, Chamier, and
Howard were, as it were, lieutenants (the last directly so) to Marryat.
The didactic side of Miss Edgeworth was taken up by Harriet Martineau.
Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_ (1818) is among the latest good examples
of the "Terror" class, to which her husband had contributed two of its
worst, and two of the feeblest books ever written by a man of the
greatest genius, in _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_, some seven years
earlier. Many women, not unnaturally, encouraged by the great examples
of Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Ferrier, attempted
novels of the most various kinds, sometimes almost achieving the purely
domestic variety, sometimes branching to other sorts. The novels of Mrs.
Gore, chiefly in the "fashionable" kind, are said to have attained the
three-score and ten in number; Mrs. Crowe dealt with the supernatural
outside of her novels if not also in them; the luckless poetess "L.E.L."
was a novelist in _Ethel Churchill_ (1837) and other books; Mrs.
Trollope, prolific mother of a more prolific son, showed not a little
power, if not quite so much taste, in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_ (1837) and
_The Widow Barnaby_. 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 othe