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, though 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 £300 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verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished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