Sept. 1. 1855.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



led 



very high tide in the Thames broke down a 

 portion of the sea-wall that protected the marshes 

 of Essex near the village of Dagenham ; a vast 

 quantity of valuable land was thereby flooded and 

 lost, and various costly and fruitless attempts 

 were, for a succession of years, made to stop the 

 breach. At last, about 1721, an engineer called 

 Captain Perry succeeded in accomplishing the 

 repair of the wall ; a feat that then made as much 

 noise as the Thames Tunnel of our day. An ac- 

 count of this work was published, which became 

 rare ; and I remember in my early days seeing a 

 large price bid at auctions for Captain Perrys 

 Account of the Stopping Dagenhanf Breach. Cap- 

 tain Perry, let me observe en passant, had shown 

 so early an aptitude for this sort of engineering, 

 that he was, about 1700, invited over to Russia 

 by the Czar Peter, and employed by him in the 

 embankment of some of his great rivers ; and 

 especially, I believe, in the formation of the quays, 

 docks, and arsenals of St. Petersburg, as well as 

 on the Don and Volga. It was on his return 

 from Russia that he undertook the work at Da- 

 genham. This work was of such importance 

 that, I believe, an act of parliament was passed, 

 constituting a body of commissioners for its 

 superintendence. 13ut, however constituted, 

 such a body existed, and they were in the 

 habit of holding . a board on the spot at least 

 once a year. As these commissioners were gen- 

 tlemen of the City, and as nothing is done in 

 England, and especially in City circles, without a 

 dinner, — Sir William Scott used to say "a dinner 

 lubricates business" — they discovered that the in- 

 land water, which could not be wholly drained, 

 produced excellent fresh- water fish, and accord- 

 ingly their visitations came in time to be con- 

 cluded with a dinner of the fish fresh caught and 

 sei-ved up in the board room, which was placed in 

 a building erected for the accommodation of the 

 superintendents close to the flood gates, and 

 usually known on the river as the Breach House. 

 I need not remind our readers how popular Mr. 

 Pitt was with the leading men of the City ; but I 

 cannot specify in what year it was that he was first 

 invited by the friendly commissioners to partake 

 of their annual _/?sA dinner, which luckily occurred 

 about the time when the labours of the session 

 were over. The dinner was successful, and came 

 to be annually repeated. Several of Mr. Pitt's 

 political colleagues and some private friends were 

 invited to accompany him. The commissioners, 

 several of whom, like Sir Robert Preston, Sir 

 William Curtis, Sir Robert Wigram, Captain 

 Cotton, &c., had villas in Essex, used to con- 

 tribute wines from their cellars, and fruit from 

 their gardens to the dessert, and by and bye turtle 

 and venison were added to the original service of 

 fish. It soon became a kind of ministerial festival, 

 whither a dozen or a dozen and a half of the 

 No. 305.] 



officials of Downing Street and Whitehall used to 

 be conveyed in the royal and Admiralty barges 

 for what was very like a schoolboy's holiday. 

 But the City gentlemen were still the patrons and 

 entertainers. I have a kind of recollection that the 

 back of the president's chair was a huge turtle shell. 

 Of those who dined there with Mr. Pitt, I believe 

 there is no one now living but Lord Lonsdale, who, 

 I though then a schoolboy, was once by special favour 

 ! allowed to accompany his father. Mr. Pitt's death 

 j did not interrupt these festive meetings. Sir 

 i Robert Preston and the City Commissioners still 

 j survived ; and Dagenham Breach had still its 

 annual morning of inspection, and its afternoon of 

 I turtle, toryism, and gaiety. I forget when, and 

 am not sure why, the scene was changed from the 

 B7-each House. I believe it was pulled down, or 

 applied to other purposes ; and I suspect the only 

 persons now living who dined there are Lords 

 Bathurst, Palmerston, and Ripon, Mr. Goulburn 

 and Mr. Croker ; but there may be others who 

 do not occur to me at this moment. Whatever 

 was the cause, the dinner was transferred to one of 

 the taverns at Greenwich ; but as it was no longer 

 an invitation from the commissioners, each attender 

 paying his scot, the circle became much wider, 

 and used to include thirty or forty of the most pro- 

 minent official parliamentary personages. When 

 the Whigs came into power they adopted this one 

 at least of the measures of their predecessors; 

 who on their parts have not, it seems, abandoned 

 the old Tory precedent (I say nothing of princi- 

 ples) to continue, though in opposition, this tra» 

 dition of their days of office. 



Such, I believe, is the history oiihe fish dinner 

 which Apicius inquires after. I will only add 

 that, when I knew anything of them, nothing could 

 be gayer or more agreeable than these annual sym- 

 posia, nor in general In better taste, though they 

 certainly had in them something of the Saturnalia 

 — soltUorum ambitione misera gravique. " Hatsell " 

 and " Hansard " were inexorably proscribed. 

 There was, I think, an occasional penalty on any 

 allusion to 'parliamentary topics, and I am sure 

 that nothing was so entirely acceptable even to 

 the gravest statesman of the party as any kind of 

 joyous 'nonsense that should drown the thoughts 

 of the lites molestas of the session. C. 



THE DOUBLE " TF," OR CAPITAL " P." 



(Vol. xli., p. 126.) 



It has always been my opinion (formed from a 

 loniT and extensive acquaintance with manu- 

 scripts) that the recent practice of spelling proper 

 names with two^s Instead of a capital letter, has 

 risen partly from a love of singularity, but 

 chiefly from an aflected accuracy in following old 



