ugh 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 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verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished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.

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. N