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 L300 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 In the large manuscript collection of his verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished satire imitating Churchill's _Rosciad_ (1761), to be entitled _The Turnspitiad_, a canine contest of which Mallet is the hero: If dogg'rel rhimes have aught to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.