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.
Neither from Smollett, however, nor from Hook, nor from Hunt, nor from anybody else did Dickens take what makes him Dickens.

His idiosyncrasy, already mentioned, is so marked that everybody acknowledges its presence: but its exact character and nature are matter not so much of debate (though they are that also in the highest degree) as matter of more or less _questing_, often of a rather blind-man's-buff kind.

There is probably no author of whom really critical estimates are so rare.

He has given so much pleasure to so many people--perhaps there are none to whom he has given more pleasure than to some of those who have criticised him most closely--that to mention any faults in him is upbraided as a sort of personal and detestable ingratitude and treachery.