David Mallet, Anglo-Scot

"This is the first major study of Mallet's life, works, career, and the ways in which he fashioned a persona for himself at a time when the Act of Union inspired young and aspiring Scotsmen such as James Thomson to leave their homeland and settle in London to make a living by the pen. It not only supersedes Frederick Dinsdale's "Memoir" (1855) of Mallet, but offers instead a comprehensive consideration of Mallet's importance within the "new" trends in literature, his changing political allegiances, and the never-ending search for patronage as well as his response to the Opposition claim that only a "Patriot King" could restore Britain to her ancient strength and glory." "For the first time, this study considers manuscript materials from a range of depositories to reconstruct Mallet's complex personality and to oppose this "character" to the one that Johnson published in the Lives of the Poets. This study reads Mallet as an important voice within the eighteenth-century literary scene and the milieu of Opposition writers, a man whose friendship Aaron Hill, Pope, and Lord Bolingbroke valued, a prolific writer who - owing to his conflicting interests and allegiances - frequently involved himself in controversy."--BOOK JACKET.