Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/672

 . 7, 1861.] How the River Thames came to be reduced to reasonable dimensions, and confined to its present channel, how it is kept within it, and how the thousands of acres of low land lying between both banks and the higher grounds are kept protected from overflow at every tide, at full and new moon, or during seasons like that through which we passed last year, are questions of no common interest, and on which a very general ignorance prevails.

The average rise of the tide in the Thames is, at London Bridge, 18 feet; at Deptford, 20; at Purfleet, 17; at Holy Haven, 15; and at the Kove, 11. From Fulham to the Nore every high tide would lay a very large proportion of the neighbouring country under water, and at spring tides would restore the appearance of the basin of the Thames to what it must have presented to Ca-sar’s eyes if he chanced to sight it hrst at flood tide, were it not for the system of embankments which line both sides of the river as well as of its tributaries.

Conjecture has ever been busy among local and general historians as to the origin of these embankments, and the credit of their construction has been very generally given to the Romans. Indeed this mighty nation of fighting and paving men share the honour of many of the most stupendous works which are scattered over the face of Europe pretty equally with a certain personage, who, if he have rightly earned the titles of the “first Whig” and the “first gentleman,” might seem equally deserving—to judge from the works ascribed to him—of that of the “first engineer” as well.

One detects a sort of grim vindictive instinct at the root of this traditional belief, which belongs equally to ancient and modern times. Oriental legendary literature, both Jewish and Arabic, for instance, delights in dwelling on the power acquired and very copiously exercised by “Solomon, the son of David, on whom be peace,” over this remarkable personage—who, by the way, is represented as a regular attendant at that great monarch’s levees—as well as over his numerous and variously ill-favoured adherents; and the tasks set him and them by the somewhat exigeant Sovereign were of so stupendous a character, and must have tasked even diabolic resources so severely, that, as one reads the legend, it is easy to conjure up the picture of the venerable and pious rabbi who wrote it, chuckling hugely over the tortures of labour which their accomplishment must have inflicted. In mediæval days this instinct seems to have been intensified rather than weakened—indeed, it increased in dimensions by importing an element of grotesqueness, not altogether wanting, but very imperfectly developed, in the rabbinical extravagances; and thus the later legends have a double aspect, a serious and a comic one. In the one, we hear of the walls of an abbey or a monastery, or of a bridge over a furious torrent, or of a dyke of immense size and corresponding benefit, ordered to be constructed by the bitterly reluctant demons in a single night; in the other, we find the Arch-fiend compelled to carry an ecclesiastic pick-a-back on a long journey at telegraphic speed, or his effigy doing duty as waterspout to a church-roof.

What public works, however, of enormous dimensions and immense difficulty cannot be clearly traced to the Great Enemy and his gang, are generally fathered next upon the Romans—and with far more solid grounds for the conjecture. Old Rome’s public works stand to this day the noblest memorial of her greatness, and are still food for wonder to an engineering and scientific age. A very curt enumeration of the baths, sewers, aqueducts, amphitheatres, temples, and other public buildings, which are due to Roman enterprise, would fill a volume; whilst the long lines of hard, durable road, which to this day intersect the countries they conquered, are solid and striking memorials of their large perception of what are the tangible appliances of a centralised government, as well as of their skill as paviours. Roman soldiers, we know, were “navvies” as well as fighting men, and could handle the spade and basket as well as “the sword and the buckler.”

No wonder that in the days of our youth, when we were of that inquiring turn of mind which prompts children to ask disagreeable questions of their elders and betters, the sight of Romney Marsh, with its four-and-twenty thousand acres rescued from the tides, should have prompted the eager question, “Who did it?” and as little wonder that the prompt reply should have been, “The Romans, my lad!” As little wonder that travelling on the long, dreary, monotonous roads that traverse the huge fiats of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, we should have asked the same question about the banked-out rivers there, and have met with the same reply; or, again, that peering over the side of that primitive Ramsgate steamer, the old City of London, in her tedious dawdle down the Thames, the miles after miles of river embankment, which protected the low ground on each side from inundation, should have caught our observant eye, and elicited the same question with the same result; or that thereupon our young, active imagination should have fallen to work at once to conjure the well-bleached stakes which, in tier above tier, support the bank, into the thigh-bones of the old Roman soldiers of whom we had read so much at school,—not without much suppressed execration of them and their historians—and should have forthwith much commended this original mode of utilising the remains of ancient heroes. It was not, however, until years and years after those inquiring days, when we had travelled between these Thames embankments scores of times, in all sorts of craft and at all periods of the tides, had taken long walks along their summits, examined their construction, and lost ourselves in the prairie wilderness and among the network of drains that lie in their rear, that we began to be conscious that they constitute a national work which, if hardly deserving the higher title of “stupendous,” may fairly lay claim to that of “enormous,” both in regard to their extent and their utility.

We had in the interim become acquainted with many cognate works; had found travellers in Holland carefully inspecting and dutifully admiring the dunes and the dykes, which prevent the land of cheese, butter, salmon, and carp from becoming