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 _Ines 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.
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