INTRODUCTION

"WEDNESDAY 19 JANUARY [1763]. This was a day eagerly expected by Dempster,
Erskine, and I, as it was fixed as the period of our gratifying 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.