Chapter I: Introduction

"WEDNESDAY 19 JANUARY [1763]. This was a day eagerly expected by Dempster, Erskine, and I, as it was fixed as the period of our gratifying a whim proposed by me: which was that on the first day of the new Tragedy called _Elvira's_ being acted, we three should walk from the one end of London to the other, dine at Dolly's, & be in the Theatre at night; & as the Play would probably be bad, and as Mr. David Malloch, the Author, who has changed his name to David Mallet, Esq., was an arrant Puppy, we determined to exert ourselves in damning it."[1]

George Dempster, aged thirty, a Scots lawyer who by putting his fortune under severe strain had been elected Member of Parliament for the Forfar and Fife burghs, was in London in his official capacity. Andrew Erskine, aged twenty-two, younger son of an impoverished Scots earl, was waiting in London till the regiment in which he held a lieutenant's commission should be "broke," following the Peace. James Boswell, heir to the considerable estate of Auchinleck in Ayrshire, also aged twenty-two, had come to London in the previous November in an attempt to secure a commission in the Foot Guards. Dempster, Erskine, and Boswell had constituted themselves a triumvirate of wit in Edinburgh as early as the summer of 1761, and had already made more than one joint appearance in print.[2]

David Mallet, now in his late fifties, was also a Scotsman. "It was remarked of him," wrote Dr. Johnson many years later, "that he was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend."[3] Scotsmen considered him a renegade. They felt that he had repudiated his country in changing his distinctively Scots name, perhaps also in learning to speak English so well that Johnson had never been able to catch him in a Scotch accent. They would have been willing to forget his humble origins if he had not shown that he was ashamed of them himself. But when he allowed himself to assume arrogant manners and to style himself "Esq." (a kind of behavior especially offensive to genuine men of family, like our trio), they chose to remember, and to remind the world, that he was the son of a tenant farmer (a Macgregor, at that), that as a boy he had been willing to run errands and to deliver legs of mutton, and that for a time in his youth he had held the menial post of Janitor in the High School of Edinburgh.

It was not merely the Scots who had their knives out for Mallet. He was generally unpopular, apparently for adequate reasons. He had accepted a large sum of money from the Duchess of Marlborough to write a life of the Duke, of which he never penned a line, though he pretended for years that he was worn out by his labors in connection with it. He courted Pope, accepted kindnesses from him, and then attacked him after he was dead. He published Bolingbroke's posthumous infidelities, causing Johnson to remark that Bolingbroke had charged "a blunderbuss against religion and morality" and had "left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman, to draw the trigger after his death."[4] His behavior towards the memory of his friend and collaborator Thomson was thought to be less than candid. He had written a discreditable party pamphlet at the instigation of the Earl of Hardwicke against the unfortunate Admiral Byng, and had then deserted Hardwicke for the Earl of Bute, who had found him a sinecure of £300 a year. And even as early as 1763 people were saying that he was really not the author of the fine ballad _William and Margaret_ which he had published as his own.

Boswell, at least, had meditated an attack on Mallet before _Critical Strictures_ was written. In the large manuscript collection of his verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished satire imitating Churchill's _Rosciad_ (1761), to be entitled _The Turnspitiad_, a canine contest of which Mallet is the hero:

If dogg'rel rhimes have aught to do with dog,
If kitchen smoak resembles fog,
If changing sides from Hardwick to Lord B--t
Can with a turnspit's turning humour suit,
If to write verse immeasurably low,
Which Malloch's verse does so compleatly show,
Deserve the preference--Malloch, take the wheel,
Nor quit it till you bring as _gude a Chiel_![5]

And the decision to damn _Elvira_ was made in advance of the performance, as we have seen.

Having failed, in spite of shrill-sounding catcalls, to persuade the audience at Drury Lane to damn the play, our trio went to supper at the house of Erskine's sister, Lady Betty Macfarlane, in Leicester Street, and there found themselves so fertile in sallies of humour, wit, and satire on Mallet and his play that they determined to meet again and throw their sallies into order. Accordingly, they dined at Lady Betty's next day (20 January). After dinner Erskine produced a draft of their observations thrown into pamphlet size, they all three corrected it, Boswell copied it out, and they drove immediately in Lady Betty's coach to the shop of William Flexney, Churchill's publisher, and persuaded him to undertake the publication. Next day Boswell repented of the scurrility of what they had written and got Dempster to go with him to retrieve the copy. Erskine at first was sulky, but finally consented to help revise it again. It went back to Flexney in a day or two, and was published on 27 January.[6]

_Elvira_ was essentially a translation or adaptation of Lamotte-Houdar's French tragedy _Inès de Castro_, a piece published forty years before, but the English audience of 1763 saw in it a compliment to the King of Portugal, whose cause against Spain Great Britain had espoused towards the end of the Seven Years' War. The preliminaries of peace had already been signed, but the spirit of belligerency had not subsided; so that the making of the only odious person in the play (the Queen) a Spaniard, and having it end with a declaration of war against Spain, could not fail to please a patriotic audience. Since nobody reads _Elvira_ any more, I shall venture to give an expanded version of Genest's outline of the plot, in order to make the comments in Critical Strictures more intelligible:

Don Pedro [son of Alonzo IV, King of Portugal] and Elvira [maid of honour to the Queen, who is the King's second wife, and is mother of the King of Spain] are privately married--the King insists that his son should marry Almeyda [the Queen's daughter, sister to the King of Spain]--he acknowledges his love for Elvira--she is committed to the custody of the Queen--Don Pedro takes up arms to rescue Elvira--he forces his way into the palace--she blames him for his rashness--the King enters, and Don Pedro throws away his sword--Don Pedro is first confined to his apartment, and then condemned to death--Almeyda, who is in love with Don Pedro, does her utmost to save him--she prevails on the King to give Elvira an audience--Elvira avows her marriage, and produces her two children--the King pardons his son--Elvira dies, having been poisoned by the Queen--Don Pedro offers to kill himself, but is prevented by his father.[7]

The play had a respectable run, in spite of its colliding with the Half-Price Riots, but contemporary accounts appear to indicate that it was not highly thought of by the judicious. I extract the following terse criticism from a letter in the _St. James's Chronicle_ for 20 January, the day after the play opened:

_A Brief Criticism on the New Tragedy of Elvira_