Minor Queries with Answers.
Passage in Bishop Horsley.—In the Introduction to Utrum Horum, a rather curious work by Henry Care, being a comparison of the Thirty-nine Articles with the doctrines of Presbyterians on the one hand, and the tenets of the Church of Rome on the other, is an extract from Dr. Hakewill's Answer (1616) to Dr. Carier, "an apostate to Popery." In it occurs the following passage: "And so, through Calvin's sides, you strike at the throat and heart of our religion." Will you allow me to ask if a similar expression is not used by Bishop Horsley in some one of his Charges?
S. S. S.
[The following passage occurs in the bishop's Charge to the clergy of St. Asaph in 1806, p. 26. "Take especial care, before you aim your shafts at Calvinism, that you know what is Calvinism, and what is not: that in that mass of doctrine, which it is of late become the fashion to abuse under the name of Calvinism, you can distinguish with certainty that part of it which is nothing better than Calvinism, and that which belongs to our common Christianity, and the general faith of the Reformed Churches; lest, when you mean only to fall foul of Calvinism, you should unwarily attack something more sacred and of higher origin.">[
"Marry come up!"—What is the origin of this expression, found in the old novelists? It perhaps originates in an adjuration of the Virgin Mary. If so, how did it gain its present form?
H. T. Riley.
[Halliwell explains it as an interjection equivalent to indeed! Marry on us, marry come up, Marry come out, interjections given by Brockett. Marry and shall, that I will! Marry come up, my dirty cousin, a saying addressed to any one who affects excessive delicacy.]
Dover Court.—What is the origin of the expression of a "Dover Court, where all are talkers and none are hearers?" There is a place called by this name in the vicinity of Harwich?
H. T. Riley.
[There is a legend, that Dover-Court Church in Essex once possessed a miraculous cross which spoke, thus noticed in the Collier of Croydon:
"And how the rood of Dovercot did speak,
Confirming his opinions to be true."
So that it is possible, as Nares suggests, that this church was the scene of confusion alluded to in the proverb: "Dover Court, all speakers and no hearers." Fox, in his Martyrology, vol. ii. p. 302., states, that "a rumour was spread that no man could shut the door, which therefore stood open night and day; and that the resort of people to it was much and very great.">[
Porter.—In what book is the word porter, meaning the malt liquor so called, first found? I have an impression that the earliest use of it that I have seen is in Nicholas Amherst's Terræ Filius, about 1726.
H. T. Riley.
[We doubt whether an earlier use of this word, as descriptive of a malt liquor, will be found than the one noticed by our correspondent; for it was only about 1722 that Harwood, a London brewer, commenced brewing this liquor, which he called "entire," or "entire butt," implying that it was drawn from one cask or butt. It subsequently obtained the name of porter, from its consumption by porters and labourers.]
Dr. Whitaker's Ingenious Earl.—
"To our equal surprise and vexation at times, we find the ancients possessed of degrees of physical knowledge with which we were mostly or entirely unacquainted ourselves. I need not appeal in proof of this to that extraordinary operation of chemistry, by which Moses reduced the golden calf to powder, and then give it mingled with water as a drink to the Israelites; an operation the most difficult in all the processes of chemistry, and concerning which it is a sufficient honour for the moderns to say, that they have once or twice practised it. I need not appeal to the mummies of Egypt, in which the art of embalming bodies is so eminently displayed, that all attempts at imitation have only showed the infinite superiority of the original to the copy. I need not appeal to the gilding upon those mummies so fresh in its lustre; to the stained silk of them, so vivid in its colours after a lapse of 3000 years; to the ductility and malleability of glass, discovered by an artist of Rome in the days of Tiberius, but instantly lost by the immediate murder of the man under the orders of the emperor, and just now boasted vainly to be re-discovered by the wildly eccentric, yet vividly vigorous, genius of that earl who professes to teach law to my lord chancellor, and divinity to my lords the bishops, who proposes to send ship, by the force of steam, with all the velocity of a ball from the mouth of a cannon, and who pretends by the power of his steam-impelled oars to beat the waters of the ocean into the hardness of adamant; or to the burning-glasses of Archimedes, recorded in their effects by credible writers, actually imitated by Proclus at the siege of Constantinople with Archimedes' own success, yet boldly pronounced by some of our best judges, demonstrably impracticable in themselves, and lately demonstrated by some faint experiments to be very practicable, the skill of the moderns only going so far as to render credible the practices of the ancients."—The Course of Hannibal, by John Whitaker, B.D., 1794, vol. ii. p. 142.
Who was the earl whose universality of genius is described above by this "laudator temporis acti?"
H. J.
[Charles Earl Stanhope, whose versatility of talent succeeded in abolishing the old wooden printing-press, with its double pulls, and substituting in its place the beautiful iron one, called after him the "Stanhope Press." His lordship's inventive genius, however, failed in the composing-room; for his transmogrified letter-cases, with his eight logotypes, once attempted at The Times' office, were soon abandoned, and the old process of single letters preferred.]
Dissimulate.—Where is the earliest use of this word to be found? It is to be met with in Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, 1723; but is not to be found, I think, in any dictionary. I was once heavily censured at school for using it in my theme; but I have more than once of late seen it used in a leading article of The Times.
H. T. Riley.
[Dissimulate occurs in Richardson's Dictionary, with the two following examples:
"Under smiling she was dissimulate,
Prouocatiue with blinkes amorous."
Chaucer, The Testament of Creseide.
"We commaunde as kynges, and pray as men, that al thyng be forgiuen to theim that be olde and broken, and to theim that be yonge and lusty, to dissimulate for a time, and nothyng to be forgiuen to very yong children."—Golden Boke, c. ix.