Critical Strictures is the merest of trifles, but at least three reasons can be given for publishing a facsimile of it.  Scholars on occasion need to be able to read all the productions of great authors no matter how trifling, and this one is excessively rare; so rare, indeed, that few of Boswell’s editors have been able to get a sight of it.  It makes a pleasant and useful footnote to Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1765, a work now being widely read, or at least widely circulated.  And it contains a remark or two that should be of interest to historians of English drama in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Mr. C. Beecher Hogan has given me expert assistance in writing two of the notes.

The copy of Critical Strictures used for making this reproduction was given to the Library of Yale University by Professor Chauncey B. Tinker.

Frederick A. Pottle
Yale University.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763, ed.  F.A.  Pottle, McGraw-Hill Book Co. (New York), William Heinemann (London), 1950, p. 152, quoted with permission of the McGraw-Hill Book Co.  This edition (which will hereafter be referred to as LJ) prints the journal in a standardized and modernized text.  In the passage above quoted I have restored the ampersands and capitals of Boswell’s manuscript.

2.  See F.A.  Pottle, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Clarendon Press, 1929, pp. 6, 12.

3.  “The Life of Mallet,” in Lives of the Poets.

4.  James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ed.  G.B.  Hill and L.F.  Powell, Clarendon Press, 6 vols., 1934-1950, i. 268. (Hereafter referred to as Life.)

5.  Douce MS 193, 93^v, quoted with permission of the Curators of the Bodleian Library.

6.  LJ, pp. 154-155, 162, 163-164, 172, partly paraphrased, partly quoted.

7.  John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from ... 1660 to 1830, 10 vols., Bath, 1832, v.12-13.

8. Life, i. 409 n. 1; The Critical Review, xv (Feb. 1763). 160.

9. The Monthly Review. xxviii (Jan. 1763). 68, written by the editor, Ralph Griffiths (B.C.  Nangle, The Monthly Review, First Series 1749-1789, Clarendon Press, 1934, p. 84, no. 995).

* * * * *

CRITICAL
STRICTURES
ON THE
New TRAGEDY
OF
ELVIRA,
WRITTEN BY
Mr. DAVID MALLOCH.

LONDON: 
Printed for W. FLEXNEY, near Gray’s Inn, Holborn. 
MDCCLXIII.

(Price Sixpence.)

* * * * *

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We have followed the Authority of Sir David Dalrymple, and Mr. Samuel Johnson, in the Orthography of Mr. Malloch’s Name; as we imagine the Decision of these Gentlemen will have more weight in the World of Letters, than even that of the said Mr. Malloch himself.