"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.