nothing.' ”
the orations of Demosthenes; others like those of Cicero, calm , persuasive ; others, more particularly those attributed to such country -gentlemen , merchants, and seamen as had seats in parliament, bear the characteristic of plainness , bluntness , and
an affected honesty, as opposed to the plausibility of such as were understood or suspected to be courtiers: the artifice had its effect; Voltaire was betrayed by it into a declaration , that the eloquence of ancient Greece and Rome was revived in the British senate, and a speech of the late earl of Chatham when
Mr. Pitt , in opposition to one of Mr. Horatio Walpole, received the highest applause, and was by all that read it taken for
genuine; and we are further told of a person in a high office under the government, who being at breakfast at a gentleman 's cham
bers in Gray 's Inn , Johnson being also there, declared , that by the style alone of the speeches in the debates, he could severally
assign them to the persons by whom they were delivered .” 14 Dr. Johnson himself declared " that the only part of his Writ ings which then gave him any compunction, was his account of the Debates in the Gentleman's Magazine; but that, at the time he wrote them , he did not think he was imposing on the world . The mode, he said , was, to fix upon a Speaker 's name; then to make an argument for him ; and to conjure up an answer . He wrote those Debates with more velocity than any other of his productions; often three columns of the Magazine within the hour. He once wrote ten pages in a single day, and that not a
long one, beginning perhaps at noon , and ending early in the evening." 15 Having once revealed the secret, Dr. Johnson " was free, and
indeed industrious, in the communication of it, for being informed that Dr. Smollett was writing a history of England, and had brought it down to the last reign, he cautioned him not to rely on the debates as given in the Magazine, for that they were not au
thentic, excepting as to their general import, the work of his own imagination .” 16 But the ability of reporters so much lauded by their contem poraries becomes the discomfiture of the historian . All of the 14 Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson , pp. 112- 116 . A . W . Hutton gives a summary of “ Dr. Johnson and the 'Gentleman 's Magazine'” in Johnson Club Papers, pp. 93 - 113.
16 J. Nichols, Rise and Progress of the Gentleman 's Magazine, p . xxxi. 16 Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson , p . 117.
