[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 {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?"