24 Presidentship of Martin Folkes 



observed certain spellings which would assuredly have drawn 

 down on him the witty earl's " ridicule." But he generally 

 remained faithful to the orthography which he had adopted. 

 Like some of his more prominent literary contemporaries 

 he always spelled plum (the fruit) with a b at the end of 

 the word. Thus he persistently wrote plumb-pudding, and 

 this dish, of which he and his associates appear to have 

 been so appreciative, carries its superfluous b triumphantly 

 through his Dinner-registers from beginning to end over a 

 period of thirty years. 



Colebrooke had likewise a fondness for double consonants 

 where a single one is now thought enough, and this parti- 

 ality occurs so frequently in final syllables as to suggest 

 that he was in the habit of pronouncing these syllables with 

 some emphasis. Thus he writes turbutt, mackerell, holly- 

 butt, rabitts, fillett, etc. 1 He retained the archaic fondness 

 for the vowel y. He always wrote pye rather than pie, 

 and when a word ended in y and he had to put it in the 

 plural, he liked to retain the y and put an s after it. Again 

 and again, when he had to record a small attendance at a 

 Club dinner which necessitated a demand on the general 

 Fund, he noted the number of deficiency^. He does not 

 seem to have been familiar with the French language, and 

 the names of foreign visitors were apt to be written by him 

 as they seemed to him to sound, so that it is not always 

 easy to make out what the names really were. Towards 

 the end of his reign also, French cookery, no doubt much 

 against his will, was creeping apace into the dinners under 

 his charge, and as if in revenge for their appearance he gives 

 to the foreign names a strange English garb. Thus "petty 

 pattys " is doubtless his phonetic rendering of " petits 

 pates " z Even with English personal names it took him 



1 Some other of the Treasurer's spellings are worth preservation : 

 Scotched callops [Scots collops ?], Collyflower, Salmon and Soals, 

 Rasberrys, Boyled fowles, Pidgeon-pye, Fowles and oyesters, minced pyes, 

 Sweet breads and Pallats, Sallad, Skate and Place, Dutch Plaise, ballance. 



2 In the Annual Register for 1758 (p. 373) there appeared a " Remon- 

 strance of the Mob of Great Britain against the importation of French 

 words." One cannot help conjecturing that Josiah Colebrooke sympathised 



