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, tho