Book excerpt: "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.