r 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. Even in _Pickwick_ the expert
will trace suggestions from others. But if the work is read in its
proper order, and the _Sketches by Boz_ are taken first, nobody who
knows both Leigh Hunt and Theodore Hook will fail to see that Dickens
owed a great deal to both. The fact is in no sense discreditable to him:
on the contrary, it adds, in the estimation of all reasonable and
critical judges, a very great deal of interest, and takes away none. The
earth-born prodigy is seldom good for much and never for very much. The
genius who fastens on the points in preceding literature most congenial
to him, develops them, builds on them with his own matter and form, and
turns out something far greater than his originals is the really
satisfactory person. 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