talents; and regarded its contributions with that awe so natural in youthful aspirants, and at once so comic and pathetic to writers of a little experience.  The names of many of Cave’s staff are preserved in a note to Hawkins.  One or two of them, such as Birch and Akenside, have still a certain interest for students of literature; but few have heard of the great Moses Browne, who was regarded as the great poetical light of the magazine.  Johnson looked up to him as a leader in his craft, and was graciously taken by Cave to an alehouse in Clerkenwell, where, wrapped in a horseman’s coat, and “a great bushy uncombed wig,” he saw Mr. Browne sitting at the end of a long table, in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, and felt the satisfaction of a true hero-worshipper.

It is needless to describe in detail the literary task-work done by Johnson at this period, the Latin poems which he contributed in praise of Cave, and of Cave’s friends, or the Jacobite squibs by which he relieved his anti-ministerialist feelings.  One incident of the period doubtless refreshed the soul of many authors, who have shared Campbell’s gratitude to Napoleon for the sole redeeming action of his life—­the shooting of a bookseller.  Johnson was employed by Osborne, a rough specimen of the trade, to make a catalogue of the Harleian Library.  Osborne offensively reproved him for negligence, and Johnson knocked him down with a folio.  The book with which the feat was performed (Biblia Graeca Septuaginta, fol. 1594, Frankfort) was in existence in a bookseller’s shop at Cambridge in 1812, and should surely have been placed in some safe author’s museum.

The most remarkable of Johnson’s performances as a hack writer deserves a brief notice.  He was one of the first of reporters.  Cave published such reports of the debates in Parliament as were then allowed by the jealousy of the Legislature, under the title of The Senate of Lilliput.  Johnson was the author of the debates from Nov. 1740 to February 1742.  Persons were employed to attend in the two Houses, who brought home notes of the speeches, which were then put into shape by Johnson.  Long afterwards, at a dinner at Foote’s, Francis (the father of Junius) mentioned a speech of Pitt’s as the best he had ever read, and superior to anything in Demosthenes.  Hereupon Johnson replied, “I wrote that speech in a garret in Exeter Street.”  When the company applauded not only his eloquence but his impartiality, Johnson replied, “That is not quite true; I saved appearances tolerably well, but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.”  The speeches passed for a time as accurate; though, in truth, it has been proved and it is easy to observe, that they are, in fact, very vague reflections of the original.  The editors of Chesterfield’s Works published two of the speeches, and, to Johnson’s considerable amusement, declared that one of them resembled Demosthenes and the other Cicero.  It is plain