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 {10} 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 ve