He
published Bolingbroke's posthumous infidelities, causing Johnson to remark
that Bolingbroke bad 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verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished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.
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