At dinner this day, we had Sir Alexander Dick, whose amiable
character, and ingenious and cultivated mind, are so generally known
(he was then on the verge of seventy, and is now (1785) eighty-one,
with his faculties entire, his heart warm, and his temper gay); Sir
David Dalrymple; Lord Hailes; Mr Maclaurin, advocate; Dr Gregory, who
now worthily fills his father's medical chair; and my uncle, Dr
Boswell. This was one of Dr Johnson's best days. He was quite in his
element. All was literature and taste, without any interruption. Lord
Hailes, who is one of the best philologists in Great Britain, who has
written papers in the World, and a variety of other works in prose and
in verse, both Latin and English, pleased him highly. He told him, he
had discovered the Life of Cheynel, in the Student, to be his.
JOHNSON. 'No one else knows it.' Dr Johnson had, before this, dictated
to me a law-paper, upon a question purely in the law of Scotland,
concerning 'vicious intromission', that is to say, intermeddling with
the effects of a deceased person, without a regular title; which
formerly was understood to subject the intermeddler to payment of all
the defunct's debts. The principle has of late been relaxed. Dr
Johnson's argument was, for a renewal of its strictness. The paper was
printed, with additions by me, and given into the Court of Session.
Lord Hailes knew Dr Johnson's part not to be mine, and pointed out
exactly where it began, and where it ended. Dr Johnson said, 'It is
much, now, that his lordship can distinguish so.'

In Dr Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, there is the following
passage:

The teeming mother, anxious for her race,
Begs, for each birth, the fortune of a face:
Yet VANE could tell, what ills from beauty spring;