fair reasoning of Butler’s Analogy:  ’Why, Sir, the greatest concern we have in this world, the choice of our profession, must be determined without demonstrative reasoning.  Human life is not yet so well known, as that we can have it.  And take the case of a man who is ill.  I call two physicians:  they differ in opinion.  I am not to lie down, and die between them:  I must do something.’  The conversation then turned on Atheism; on that horrible book, Systeme de la Nature[130]; and on the supposition of an eternal necessity, without design, without a governing mind.  JOHNSON.  ’If it were so, why has it ceased?  Why don’t we see men thus produced around us now?  Why, at least, does it not keep pace, in some measure, with the progress of time?  If it stops because there is now no need of it, then it is plain there is, and ever has been, an all powerful intelligence.  But stay! (said he, with one of his satyrick laughs[131].) Ha! ha! ha!  I shall suppose Scotchmen made necessarily, and Englishmen by choice.’

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[132], advocate; Dr. Gregory, who now worthily fills his father’s medical chair[133]; 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[134], 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[135], 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[136], 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,
      And Sedley curs’d the charms which pleas’d a king[137].’