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  In the large manuscript collection of his verses preserved in the Bodleian Library are two scraps of an unpublished satire imitating Churchill’s Rosciad (1761), to be entitled The Turnspitiad, a canine contest of which Mallet is the hero: 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 Ines 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: