MALLET, DAVID, the author of the ballad of William and Margaret, was the son of a small innkeeper at Crieff, in Perthshire, and was born about the year 1700. His real name was Malloch, and he is supposed to have been a descendant of the proscribed clan of Macgregor. According to the most recent account, he studied first at Aberdeen, and afterwards at Edinburgh, and while attending the university in the latter city he became tutor to the sons of the Duke of Montrose. Accompanying his pupils to London, and on a tour through the Continent, and coming in contact with persons of the highest rank, Mallet gradually acquired that knowledge of the world, and that refinement of manners, which were, perhaps, the chief stepping-stones to his subsequent eminence. He fixed his residence in London; and in 1724 published, in No. 36 of the Plain Dealer, his ballad of William and Margaret, the work by which he is now best remembered. The spirit of this piece seems to have been caught from the two old ballads, William's Ghost and Fair Margaret, yet there is sufficient originality in its simple feeling and graceful diction to entitle Mallet to be called its author. It was about this time, when he was moving in the society of the chief wits of the day, and was desirous of expunging every trace of his humble origin, and even of his native country, that Mallet assumed the name by which he is now known. In 1728 appeared his Excursion, a servile imitation of the style of Thomson, who was then becoming known to the world. His poem on Verbal Criticism, published in 1773, was a satire on Bentley, written to please Pope. About this period Frederick Prince of Wales, who was at variance with his father, and was courting popularity by patronizing literary men, appointed Mallet his under-secretary, with a salary of L.200; and in 1740 employed him, conjointly with Thomson, to write The Masque of Alfred, in honour of the birthday of the Princess Augusta. This piece Mallet afterwards entirely altered, and produced, without any great success, on the stage of Drury Lane. In 1742 he married his second wife, the daughter of Lord Carlisle's steward, and received L.10,000 as her dowry. Not content with the liberal fortune which he now possessed, Mallet was yet mercenary enough to become the hired tool of any one. He was employed by Lord Bolingbroke, in 1749 to traduce his deceased patron Pope, in a preface to that nobleman's Patriot King, and received as his paltry payment the bequest of his lordship's works. With equal servility did he lend himself to government for the
purpose of directing the public vengeance against the ill-fated Admiral Byng. The admiral was shot in 1757, and Mallet received a pension. Towards the close of his life Mallet repaired to France for the benefit of his health, but on feeling that his constitution was rapidly giving way, he returned to England, and died soon afterwards, in April 1765. The base character of the man was now revealed in glaring distinctness. It was discovered that a Life of the great Duke of Marlborough, which he had been hired to write by a legacy of L.1000 from the old duchess, and by a pension from the second duke, and which he had professed during his latter years to be composing, was not even begun.
Mallet was an avowed infidel. "As a writer," says Dr Johnson, "he cannot be placed in any high class. There is no species of composition in which he was eminent. His dramas had their day—a short day—and are forgotten; his blank verse seems to my ear the echo of Thomson." Besides the works already mentioned, Mallet wrote Eurydice, Mustapha, and Elvira, tragedies; Britannia, a masque; Amyntor and Theodora, a poem; and a Life of Bacon. His Ballads and Songs, with Notes and Illustrations, accompanied by a Memoir by Frederick Dinsdale, were published in London, 1857.