[600] Three months earlier Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale:—'We are not far from the great year of a hundred thousand barrels, which, if three shillings be gained upon each barrel, will bring us fifteen thousand pounds a year.' Piozzi Letters, i. 357. We may see how here, as elsewhere, he makes himself almost one with the Thrales.
[601] See ante, p. 97.
[602] Mrs. Aston. BOSWELL.
[603] See State Trials, vol. xi. p. 339, and Mr. Hargrave's argument. BOSWELL. See ante, p. 87.
[604] The motto to it was happily chosen:—
'Quamvis ille niger, quamvis tu candidus esses.'
I cannot avoid mentioning a circumstance no less strange than true, that a brother Advocate in considerable practice, but of whom it certainly cannot be said, Ingenuas didicit fideliter artes, asked Mr. Maclaurin, with a face of flippant assurance, 'Are these words your own?' BOSWELL. Sir Walter Scott shows where the humour of this motto chiefly lay. 'The counsel opposite,' he writes, 'was the celebrated Wight, an excellent lawyer, but of very homely appearance, with heavy features, a blind eye which projected from its socket, a swag belly, and a limp. To him Maclaurin applied the lines of Virgil:—
'Quamvis ille niger, quamvis tu candidus esses,
O formose puer, nimium ne crede colori.'
['Though he was black, and thou art heavenly fair,
Trust not too much to that enchanting face.'
DRYDEN. Virgil, Eclogues, ii. 16.] Mr. Maclaurin wrote an essay against the Homeric tale of 'Troy divine,' I believe, for the sole purpose of introducing a happy motto,—