[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.
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