There are generally to be found about twenty reporters in the gallery, but this number is greatly increased on a "field night," when it is usual to find as many as thirty-five or forty journalists in the gallery. From what I have seen of these parliamentary reporters they seem to be very deliberate in their movements, and they do not allow anything to hurry them. They are nearly all, however, very pleasant gentlemen, and with few exceptions, men of experience and scholarly attainments, two-thirds of them being men who have taken honors at the universities, or at Harrow, Eton, or Rugby, and in not a few instances they have begun life by taking minor orders in the church, and having toyed with journalism for some time they were unable at last to resist its feverish fascination. Some few of them are in the Inns of Court--embryo barristers during the day, and at night they practise short-hand, earn a respectable living, and gain experience from England's chosen representatives up in their secluded nooks in the gallery of the House. It was not always that the press and its reporters had such privileges as they now possess in the House of Commons. [Sidenote: DR. JOHNSON TAKING NOTES.] Before the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, there were no satisfactory records of the debates in the House. The fierce contests between Walpole, Windham, Pulteney, and others had, indeed, for some time before 1740, attracted attention to the proceedings of the House, and they had been regularly reported in a confused long-hand sort of fashion every month in the _Gentleman's_ and _London Magazine_, the former publication commencing the debates in January, 1731, the latter in April, 1732, but no attempt can be said to have been made to convey more than the substance of the speeches until that department of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ was intrusted to gruff old Samuel Johnson, in November, 1740. This is the commencement of the era of parliamentary reporting in England. Short-hand, before that time is involved in chaos, and it is doubtful if Johnson knew anything more than the rudiments of the then crude system of stenography. Indeed, Johnson appears to have given more of his own eloquence than of what had actually been uttered in Parliament; but still, what he did was, in all probability, only to substitute one kind of eloquence for another--a better for a worse; or, it might be, sometimes, a worse for a better--and therefore, on the whole, the speeches written by him, though less true to the letter than those given by his predecessors, may be received as a more living, and, as such, a truer representation of the real debates than had ever before been produced.