Soon after The Pickwick Papers burst upon early Victorian England "like a skyrocket," readers began drawing parallels between the young Dickens and comic writers of the eighteenth century, notably Sterne and Fielding. However, apart from making a few general observations upon the resemblance between Sam Weller and Corporal Trim, neither the Victorians nor later generations of readers attempted a sustained analysis of the relationship between Pickwick, Tristram Shandy, and A Sentimental Journey. In a famous contemporary review, the Athenaeum censured Boz for a lack of originality ("He runs closely upon some leading hounds in the humorous pack") and declared The Pickwick Papers to be "made up of two pounds of Smollett, three Ounces of Sterne, a handful of Hook, a dash of grammatical Pierce Egan — incidents at pleasure, served with an additional sauce piquante." With a similar lack of precision, Gissing, in praising the aesthetic and moral superiority of Dombey's Mr. Toots to related figures in modern psychological novels, remarked that Dickens' delight in the "sacred simplicity" of such a character made him "akin to Oliver Goldsmith and the better part of Sterne." General historians of the English novel have also suggested links between the two great humorists, but again without specifying the nature of the affinities which they have sensed. Ernest A. Baker, for example, remarks that a surprising number of late Romantic and Victorian writers — De Quincey, Carlyle, Thackeray, Peacock, and Meredith as well as Dickens — "show traces of Shandeism or of a quality cognate with it"; and Legouis and Cazamian suggest that in the highly idiosyncratic Shandy circle, Sterne created a group of figures which haunted Dickens' imagination: "They [the Shandys] all possess an oddity allied to a naturalness, and are gifted with an inner vitality that overcomes the resistance of judgment, and imposes the feeling of reality through the saving grace of our sympathy; but their outlines are keyed up to an extremely intense pitch; indeed, they only escape being caricatures by the geniality with which they are instinct. Dickens will remember these types."