David Mallet (writer)

There he became friendly with Alexander Pope, James Thomson, and other literary figures including Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

His other plays and poetry (e.g. Amyntor and Theodora), popular at the time, are largely forgotten, but Bolingbroke's writings were edited and published by Mallet in 1754.

Mallet was probably the second son of James Malloch of Dunruchan, a well-to-do tenant farmer on Lord Drummond's Perthshire estate, a Roman Catholic, and a member of the outlawed Clan MacGregor.

In 1720 he became resident tutor to the sons of Mr. Home of Dreghorn; he held the post till 1723, studied at the same time at the University of Edinburgh (1721–2, 1722–3), and formed a friendship with a fellow student, James Thomson the poet, a future collaborator.

Towards the end of 1731 he left the Montrose family, and went to Gosfield in Essex, to act as tutor to the stepson of John Knight, to whose wife, formerly Mrs. Newsham, he had been recommended by Alexander Pope.

[1] On 2 November 1733 Mallet, with his pupil, matriculated at St. Mary Hall, Oxford, where he resided fairly regularly till 27 September 1734.

[1] Mallet was rewarded in 1763 by Lord Bute, to whom he had given fulsome praise, with the post of inspector of exchequer-book in the outports of London, a sinecure which he held till his death.

Shortly before his engagement with the Montrose family he composed the ballad of William and Margaret which was published first anonymously in black letter, and then in 1724, in Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, and Aaron Hill's Plain Dealer No.

It was played in the gardens of Cliefden, before the Prince and Princess of Wales, on Friday, 1 August 1740, with Quin, Christiana Horton, and Kitty Clive in the leading parts.

Samuel Johnson remarked on this enterprise that Bolingbroke had "spent his life in charging a gun against Christianity", and "left half-a-crown to a hungry Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death".

Garrick took the part of Don Pedro, the last original character in which he was seen; but it provoked a pamphlet of Critical Strictures by James Boswell and two fellow Scots.

In the intervening years Mallet had written lesser works, including the ballad of Edwin and Emma (1760), and a partisan indictment by a "Plain Man" against Admiral Byng in 1757.