Most of its pages were filled with reproductions of articles from the weekly journals; but it included brief notices of books, and occasional poems and records of events and miscellaneous literature; and, in short, was complex enough to require a judicious editor. Johnson tells how Cave, when he had heard that one subscriber out of the 10,000 whom he speedily attracted was likely to drop the magazine, would say, 'Let us have something good in the next number.' Nothing more could be required to prove that Cave had the true editorial spirit. Still, however, the editor was not, and for a long time he was not to be, differentiated from the proprietor. Cave himself looked after every detail. He arranged for the parliamentary reports (a plan in which his first predecessor appears to have been our old friend Boyer in his monthly Political State), and employed the famous reporter who clothed the utterances of every orator of those days in sonorous Johnsonese. The success of The Gentleman's Magazine probably led to The Monthly Review, started by Ralph Griffiths in 1749, and as this was of a Whiggish turn, it was opposed by The Critical Review, started by Archibald Hamilton in 1756, and supported by Smollett;
