In 1734 Edward Cave, founder of the Gentleman's Magazine, received a pseudonymous letter whose writer made a number of suggestions for the improvement of the magazine. The writer, “S. Smith,” was a young man named Samuel Johnson who, four years later, was to take over duties which made him virtually the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine until 1745. During the period from 1738 to 1745, then, Johnson may be assumed to have had full knowledge of all contributions to the magazine as well as no little voice in the selection of those thought worthy of publication. Possibly the implications of this fact have not been fully realized. Johnson probably read most of the contributions with the critical eye of an editor and, I suppose it proper to conjecture, re-read or glanced over the periodical upon its monthly appearances. In short, one can assume Johnson's close familiarity with much of the contents of the Gentleman's Magazine for a number of years, and it is not surprising in view of his remarkable memory that he should sometimes fall back upon this large body of material, consciously or unconsciously, in his own writings. I hope to demonstrate here one such use of the contents of the magazine that led to the writing of Ramblers 186 and 187.

To the dozen MSS. of the Cronaca di Partenope previously known to students of medieval Neapolitan literature, one may now add a thirteenth codex of this “prima opera scritta nel dialetto napoletano.” This text is found in M 801 of the Pierpont Morgan Library, a MS. as well known to the art historian as it is (apparently) unfamiliar to literary historians. For the past half-century the Cronaca di Partenope in M 801 has been described as a “diary of events at Naples,” a title which was fathered upon the present tract by no less an authority than Sir Edward Maunde Thompson.