Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of Elvira, Written by Mr. David Malloch | Page 2

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 In the large manuscript collection of his verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished satire imitating Churchill's Rosciad (1761), to be entitled The Turnspitiad, a canine contest of which Mallet is the hero: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. 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 Inès 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. Since nobody reads Elvira any more, I shall venture to give an expanded version of Genest's outline of the plot, in order to make the comments in Critical Strictures more intelligible:
Don Pedro [son of Alonzo IV, King of Portugal] and Elvira [maid of honour to the Queen, who is the King's second wife, and is mother of the King of Spain] are privately married--the King insists that his son should marry Almeyda [the Queen's daughter, sister to the King of Spain]--he acknowledges his love for Elvira--she is committed to the custody of the Queen--Don Pedro takes up arms to rescue Elvira--he forces his way into the palace--she blames him for his rashness--the King enters, and Don Pedro throws away his sword--Don Pedro is first confined to his apartment, and then condemned to death--Almeyda, who is in love with Don Pedro, does her utmost to save him--she prevails on the King to give Elvira an audience--Elvira avows her marriage, and produces her two children--the King pardons his son--Elvira dies, having been poisoned by the Queen--Don Pedro offers to kill himself, but is prevented by his father.[7]
The play had a respectable run, in spite of its colliding with the Half-Price Riots, but contemporary accounts appear to indicate that it was not highly thought of by the judicious. I extract the following terse criticism from a letter in the St. James's Chronicle for 20 January, the day after the play opened:
A Brief Criticism on the New Tragedy of Elvira
Act I. Indifferent.
Act II. Something better.
Act III. MIDDLING.
Act IV. Execrable.
Act V. Very Tolerable.
Dempeter later regretted his share in Critical Strictures on the ground that neither he nor his collaborators could have written a tragedy nearly so good. The Critical Review, in which Mallet himself sometimes wrote, characterized the pamphlet as "the crude