Whitebait have long been numbered among the delicacies of our tables; for we find "six dishes of Whitebait" in the funeral feast of the munificent founder of the Charterhouse, given in the Hall of the Stationers' Company, on May 28, 1612--the year before the Globe Theatre was burnt down, and the New River completed. For aught we know these delicious fish may have been served up to Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth in their palace at Greenwich, off which place, and Blackwall opposite, Whitebait have been for ages taken in the Thames at flood-tide. To the river-side taverns we must go to enjoy a "Whitebait dinner," for, one of the conditions of success is that the fish should be directly netted out of the river into the cook's cauldron. About the end of March, or early in April, Whitebait make their appearance in the Thames, and are then small, apparently but just changed from the albuminous state of the young fry. During June, July, and August, immense quantities are consumed by visitors to the different taverns at Greenwich and Blackwall. Pennant says: Whitebait "are esteemed very delicious when fried with fine flour, and occasion during the season a vast resort of the _lower order of epicures_ to the taverns contiguous to the places where they are taken." If this account be correct, there must have been a strange change in the grade of the epicures frequenting Greenwich and Blackwall since Pennant's days; for at present, the fashion of eating Whitebait is sanctioned by the highest authorities, from the Court of St. James's Palace in the West, to the Lord Mayor and _his_ court in the East; besides the philosophers of the Royal Society, and her Majesty's Cabinet Ministers. Who, for example, does not recollect such a paragraph as the following, which appeared in the _Morning Post_ of the day on which Mr. Yarrell wrote his account of Whitebait, September 10th, 1835?-- "Yesterday, the Cabinet Ministers went down the river in the Ordnance barges to Lovegrove's West India Dock Tavern, Blackwall, to partake of their annual fish dinner. Covers were laid for thirty-five gentlemen." For our own part, we consider the Ministers did not evince their usual good policy in choosing so late a period as September; the Whitebait being finer eating in July or August; so that their "annual fish dinner" must rather be regarded as a sort of prandial wind-up of the parliamentary session than as a specimen of refined epicurism.