Note 9 — 4.

David Mallet, or Malloch, poet, playwright, and miscellaneous writer (1705-65), is best known for his ballad of William and Margaret, his unsubstantiated claim to the authorship of Rule Britannia, and his edition of Bolingbroke's works. Bolingbroke, said Dr. Johnson, had "spent his life in charging a gun against Christianity," and "left half-a-crown to a hungry Scotchman to draw the trigger." Mallet was "a great declaimer in all the London coffee-houses against Christianity," and the obtrusion of his sceptical views made his household unpleasing to David Hume. To his house Gibbon was taken after his reception into the Church of Rome.