Trained under Zamir, ranked beside Anis
Mirza Salamat Ali, poetically surnamed Dabir, "was born at Delhi in 1218 A. H. 1803 A. D." His father was one Mirza Ghulam Hussain (Saksena, p. 131). The family had fled Delhi's devastation for Lucknow, and "Dabir, however came, with his father to Lucknow when he was seven years of age and was educated thoroughly" (Saksena, p. 131). Marsiya, the Shia elegy for the martyrs of Karbala, took hold of him early: "Poetry and especially the marsia exercised great fascination for him and he became a pupil of Zamir, the great rival and contemporary of Khaliq" (Saksena, p. 131). When his teacher's generation retired, Saksena's account of Mir Anis records that "with the retirement and death of Khaliq and Zamir, the field was left open to Dabir and Anis" (Saksena, p. 128), and Dabir took up the elegy alongside the poet who became his lifelong rival.
A death within a year of Anis, and what later opinion did with him
Dabir "died in 1922 A. H. (1875 A. D.) in Lucknow and was buried in his house" (Saksena, p. 132), within a year of Anis. Saksena's own history records, in order to argue against it, the verdict that later settled on him: "It has been the fashion in some circles to underrate Dabir and assign him a position immeasurably below Anis" (Saksena, p. 133). Of his own verse, one elegy composed entirely without dotted letters opened "Hum tale-e-Huma murad hum rasa hua", which Frances W. Pritchett translates from Muhammad Husain Azad's Aab-e-Hayat as "My far-reaching imagination has the same fortune-star as the Huma" (Wikipedia, 'Mirza Salaamat Ali Dabeer').