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son did not treat him with becoming complacency. It was very vexatious, to be sure, to have her wishes overturned as unfeelingly as the cosmetics of the Miss Primroses, for having hair as blonde as a babe's we are told that she was always fretting about it, and endeavouring to dye it black, to which the doctor as constantly objected.

ment to take up their abode in the neighbour- nice living, and unsuitable expense, Mrs. Johnhood, I cannot think these things, independent of the gaiety or fashion of the place, would have brought Colley Cibber to his lodgings in that picturesque old timbered house at Frognell, of which White of Fleet-street published an engraving, 1814, and which, like Evelyn's home at Oxford, was subsequently converted to the parish workhouse, and has long since been taken down. Here annually, however, came the worldly, witty, clever, vain, old man, hunting after new beauties, as Richardson tells us, at 76 years of age, and fancying the youngest and most charming women in the Hampstead walks, as on the pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, in love with him. In his summer retirement, as Lysson calls it, he had Booth and Wilks the actors for companions, and together they concocted their theatrical plans for the winter's entertainment of the public.

Nor, if we accept Mrs. Thrale's assertion, that Dr. Johnson had no love of flowers, or gardens, or fine views; "walking in a wood when it rained being the only rural image that pleased him,” can we attribute his burly presence here to the beauties of the neighbourhood. Yet he frequented it, and generally lodged at West-end. It is probable that he found benefit from the air, though so far from acceding to thewishes of Drs. Soames, Hare, and Plumptre, and substituting the Wells water to the abolition of tea, he appears to have daily increased the number of his cups.

It is not a pleasant glimpse of matrimonial life which we obtain through the then latticed windows of the West-end lodgings; but the doctor had many resources with which to compose himself in the teeth of these domestic vexations. They possibly affected him as the puny blows of his wife did the brawny navigator we have somewhere heard of: at any rate, we are told that when death stilled the little fretful lips, and dulled the blond hair for ever, her husband sincerely mourned for her. It was in this year (1748) that Dr. Akenside, divided between poetry and his profession, endeavoured to establish himself in the practise of both in the popular locality of Frognell, where his friend and patron, the Right Hon. Jeremiah Dyson, joined him. Horace Walpole, writing in 1750, observes: "Here is another of those tame geniuses, a Mr. Akenside, who writes odes. In one he has lately published he says

its first appearance, it attracted much notice from the elegance of its language and the warm colouring of the descriptions. Dr. Akenside practised at West-end and the neighbourhood for nearly three years, but was never popular. The people of Hampstead had a special dislike of poverty, and objected to his mean extraction and his state of patronage; so, though he was constantly to be seen at the assembly and longroom, and made it a point of duty to attend the balls, &c., he appears neither to have made friends nor a practise.

Light the tapers-urge the fire!' Had not you rather make gods jostle in the dark, than light the candles for fear they should break their heads?" But in criticising the author's In 1748 we find him located at Frognell," Pleasures of Imagination," he allows that, at where he wrote the greater part, if not the whole, of his translation of the 10th satire of Juvenal, and subsequently the "Vanity of Human Wishes." Something is due probably to the reputation of the Wells, but more to the "perpetual illness and perpetual opium" "of fair, frivolous, pretty Mrs. Johnson, whose craving for country air was sometimes gratified at great inconvenience to her husband. Every one has read of his strolling about at nights with Savage; but the fact is, that, having taken apartments for his wife at Hampstead, he could not afford a second lodging for himself in town, and, when too late to return to the country, nothing was left to hiin but to accept the al fresco hospitality of his friend, which consisted in giving him his company. The story exemplifies as fully as a volume would do the exigent selfishness of the one character, and the self-sacrificing tenderness of the other; for, with all his roughness and bearlike growl, as Northcote calls it, there was a fine vein of loving kindness in the doctor's nature. Alas! we fearhe found material for an exposition of the "Vanity of Human Wishes," not far from home; for we learn that notwithstanding his generous indulgence of her love of country air,

Probably another tame genius may have been Dr. Armstrong, who published his didactic poem, "The Art of Preserving Health,"* the year that Pope died; this our critic pronounced

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Very well, but his pride most disgusting." In the year that Horace Walpole wrote his strictures on the first of these medical professors of poetry, he wrote also of the earthquake panic, which sent numbers of people to Hampstead, and the high grounds of the northern suburbs, to escape suffering the fate of the metropolis, which a mad trooper ("next to the Bishop of London) had predicted should be swallowed up by an earthquake in the April of this year.

The shock of one had been felt

*Lord Mahon, in his history, gives copies of on the 8th of February, and again on the more than one letter written by the great statesman 8th of March; and faith in the proverbial fafrom this retreat, and which are interesting as tality of the third time, led to the belief that a proving the dates of his visits there, thus: "North-final one would take place on the 8th of April, end (Hampstead), Saturday, 4 o'clock, August 23rd, 1766,"

* Many references to Hampstead occur in this poem,

when the three months terminated, at the end of which the prophetic trooper had announced the destruction of London. "This frantic terror," writes Horace Walpole, on the 2nd of April, "prevails so much, that within these three days seven hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner." "Several women," he adds, "made themselves earthquake gowns, to sit out-of-doors all-night." The day passed, however, and, except that the unfortunate seer was sent to Bedlam, nothing came of the prophecy.

If it is pleasant, as we feel the spongy places in the somewhat treacherous paths across the Heath yield to our footsteps, to remember how often these precincts may have shook beneath the rolling gait and ponderous pressure of the great lexicographer, it is not less so to imagine the presence of Hogarth, ever on the look out for comedy and human nature, amongst the heterogeneous company in the gardens or on the Heath. We know that Highgate was a favourite resort of his, and Hampstead was too near and too well filled with subjects for his repertoire of character and incident to be neglected. I love to think, too, that his friend-another great heart and moralist in his own way-good Captain Coram, was sometimes in his company.

Hither, a few years later (1756-7)-for the days of the "jessamy bride," and the "bloomcoloured" coat had not yet dawned on him, but out of a poet's love for the beautiful-came Oliver Goldsmith, who, with his heart still true to the memory of sweet Lissoy, could yet write of the view from Hampstead Hill, that "Nature never exhibited a more magnificent prospect." It was the same "most curious prospect of a most beautiful city, and a most pleasant country" (it is good to reiterate superlatives in such a scene) that old Camden had glorified two centuries before; and we must remember that the Hampstead Hill of those days was not the Hampstead Hill of the present, but remained at its natural altitude, the road as we see it not having been cut down till 1763; so that from its summit-as was said by some old author of Highgate Hill-one trod upon the top of St. Pauls. Carriages in ascending it tacked to and fro, as ships do against a foul wind, and to a pedestrian, on a summer's day, attired in a black velvet suit and three-cornered hat-the costume adopted at second-hand by poor Goldy, when, for professional purposes, he moulted the tarnished suit of green and gold, in which he appeared on first coming to town-the ascent must have been rather trying. Doubtless he had read Armstrong's lines

"but if the busy town

Attract thee still to toil for power, or gold,
Sweetly thou may'st thy vacant hours possess
In Hampstead, courted by the western wind."

And it may be that the solitudes of the upper heath, with its hawthorn thickets, its broken ground and gravelly hollows, or the stillness of

the rustic lanes in its vicinity, may have proved as propitious to his muse as they did in later times to those of Keats and Shelley. At all events, to breathe the air upon its heights, for this was the time, if ever, when he "lived amongst the beggars in Axe-lane," must have made him who was brimful of the love of nature feel as the gods felt when respiring that of Olympus, sublimely indifferent to mundane matters. Then the garrulous, flighty, talker grew serene, and "communed with himself, and was still." Here, in all probability, some of the later portions of the "Traveller" may have been thought out, that poem which, in after years, modified for Miss Reynolds the ugliness of the sallow, melancholy-looking man, with heavy protuberant forehead, and grim frown between the brows (the result of thought, which not even his friends gave him credit for) but whose "ill-natured eyes," as he himself calls them, nevertheless grew tender with compassion at the sight of want or sorrow.

It was another thing when, ceasing to be a mere Grub-street hack, he moved to Wine Office Court, and gave suppers (!) and came hither for a "shoemaker's holiday," as he expressed it, with his "Jolly Pigeon friends," to make a day of it at the Spaniards, or some other hostelry in the neighbourhood. But, at the period we are writing of, Goldsmith was correcting the press for Mr. Samuel Richardson, the literary bookseller of Salisbury-court, whose epistolary novels had just then taken the town by storm, and who himself frequently figured in the shady Hampstead-well walk, as well as Tunbridge Wells, where Loggan the dwarf included him amongst others of our Hampstead celebrities who frequented that pleasant sanatorium. Old Colly Cibber, Dr. and Mrs. Johnson, Garrick, and Mrs. Fraisi the singer, whose fine, expansive person and expensive dress made an important appearance in the walks.

Richardson, by the way, has indelibly connected his memory with the Heath, by lodging his interesting heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, at the Upper Flask; which house, and the walk so called, foreigners of distinction, Jesse tells us, in his "George Selwyn and his Times," have often visited for the sake of beholding a scene connected with her history, as if Clarissa had been a living instead of an imaginary person

age.

About two years previous to our glimpse of Goldsmith, Mr. Murray, then Attorney-General, purchased Caen Wood (1755), and, some time after, bought and included that part of Turner's Wood which was occupied by the "humorous cottage," water-works, tea-drinking house, and gardens of New Georgia,-a name probably given to it in honour of the Second George. Thus fell the popular pillory, the sinkingchair, the subteraneous water, and all the comical inventions of old Robert Castor, which made the place" in a wild wood," as he phrased it, one of the favourite Sunday resorts of the itizens.

Looking at an old print of Caen Wood before

me, it appears a fitting home for learned leisure, handsome without grandeur, and lapped amongst bowery woods, with fine gardens, and ornamented grounds. In these, Lord Mansfield is said to have found much pleasure, and amongst the celebrated cedars of Lebanon (young when Lambert saw them), is one said to have been planted by his own hand.

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Upper Flask, and from the quarterly subscriptions, fines, &c., a fund for charitable purposes came to be founded. In 1787 the members, with Mr. Montague at their head, established the Sunday-school at Hampstead-a sufficient proof that the rule of the society had been actively carried out, and had borne fruit after its kind; for, in those days, when neither national or British schools, or scarcely any others existed for the children of the poor, the value of Sundayschools could scarcely be over-rated. Mr. Percival also patronized this school. Mr. Montague was, we read, a friend of Mr., afterwards Lord Erskine the Chancellor, who occupied the last of that group of three houses near the Spaniards and the "thrice-three Elms," the first of which (since the residence of Mr. Bosanquet) was the dwelling of that benefactor to the sylvan beauty of the Heath, the retired tobacconist, Mr. Turner. The second had for its inhabitant the poet, Mr. Edwin Cox, whose reference to Hampstead Heath has already been quoted.

Eighteen years after Caen Wood came into his Lordship's possession, I find in the historical chronicle of the "Gentleman's Magazine" the following entry, January 1st, 1773: "This day the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield entertained at his house at Caen Wood, near Hampstead, about four-hundred people, and gave each a half-crown and a quartern loaf after dinner was over." It was a year of scarcity and much want, and this princely hospitality to poor neighbours was admirably calculated to make the donor popular; yet seven years afterwards, in the course of the Gordon riots, we find the mob, after sacking and setting fire to his lordship's house in Bloomsburysquare, under pretence of religious zeal (his Coming down the years, I find that literary lordship being suspected of favouring Catho- people, either as residents or visitors, more and licism) rushing off to Caen Wood, with the in- more affected Hampstead and the Heath-no tention of destroying that mansion also. The great matter of surprise to us who have tasted routes of the rioters lay through Highgate and the inspiration of its fresh windiness and sumHampstead, at the junction of which roads stood mer glory, and the cold splendour of its wintry the Spaniards," the very sight of which sug- landscapes, with a Danby-like sky reddening gested foaming tankards of ripe ale; whereupon the west, and making wider and whiter the the landlord, who knew their object, affecting fields of snow that, stretching from Child's Hill rabble sympathies, invited them to stop and (unbuilt on, by the way, till the commencement refresh themselves, an offer rarely refused by of the present century) to the low-lying Gospelsuch company, and while they were thus Oak meadows on the one hand, spread, far strengthening themselves for their work of de-away, it may be, to the Datchet meads on the struction, and forgetting in mellow cups the lapse of time, a detachment of Horseguards surrounded the house aud took the ringleaders (amongst whom we hope was the sweep who danced round the burning treasures in front of his lordship's house in Bloomsbury-square, in a hooped and furbelowed dress of her ladyship's) prisoners. Literature still deplores the loss of Lord Mansfield's collection of books, and most of all his private papers and notes, which, though he lived to the patriarchal age of ninetysix, could never be replaced or rewritten. In the meanwhile, to return to Hampstead, we find Frognell House in the possession of Edw. Montague, Esq., Master in Chancery, from whom it was called Montague House. It is now the Sailor's Orphan School for Girls-a use that would have delighted the heart of its once proprietor, who seems to have been a man of sense and refined feeling, as well as a prac-philosopher desiderated in a wife! This was in tical philanthropist. We find him one of the principals of that band of gentlemen who, setting their faces against the drinking habits of the times, and the light, frivolous, often objectionable conversation prevalent in mixed society, pledged themselves to keep within the bounds of temperance, and to introduce subjects, or topics of conversation, that should tend to improve the understanding and the heart. Under the name of " Philo-investiges," the members of the society held their meetings at the

other. The still woods wrapped in rime-frost, every tree crystallized, as it were, and the tall groups of elms, with each reticulate branch and spray, delineated with photographic accuracy against the clear atmosphere, whose sharpness warmed the pedestrian while it stung him.

It was under such conditions that Lovell Edgworth saw the Heath, when he visited his philosophical but eccentric friend Day, the author of " Sandford and Merton," who had lodged his newly-married wife in inconvenient lodgings at Hampstead-and with whom Edgworth found him walking on the Heath, though the snow covered the ground; but then, the lady was sensibly attired in a frieze cloak and thick shoes, and surprised the visitor-who had been led to imagine her an exceedingly delicate person - by an appearance of rude health. We wonder if she had the large white arms the

1776-rather out of order with the sequence of our chronology, but this, from the desultory nature of our subject, is hardly to be observed.

While the Philo-investiges were holding their meetings, for their own good and that of social morality at Hampstead, there was living amongst them, Dr. Aikin, and his sisters Lucy and Lelitia, the latter better known as Mrs. Barbauld, and two wild girls, never so happy as in seeing the "gold thorn" blazing on the Heath, and in sporting in the old gravel-pits, and by

the water-courses, and in the gravel-pits, and haw | thorn thickets, or gathering flowers in the woods. These were the daughters of Dr. Baillie, shy, wild, nature-loving girls, one of whom was destined to give celebrity to the Heath, and link its name in the future with hers and poetry. Meanwhile, Mrs. Barbauld and her husband, the pastor of a small dissenting congregation in Hampstead, eeked out his frugal stipend by receiving a select number of pupils, with whose education she assisted him. They resided in one of that frigidly genteel line of houses known as Church-row, and here we catch a glimpse of her on some holiday occasion, when the boys were getting up the performance of Henry the Fourth cutting paper ruffs, and trimming up their hats with white feathers. I think I have heard that Denman and Sir William Gill were two of her pupils, and never in after life forgot their mental obligations to her.

The Barbauld's continued to reside here from 1787 to 1802, when they removed to the green, Stoke Newington, where Rochmont Barbauld (he was a German) died.

In 1789 the population of Hampstead received an accession by the arrival of some two-hundred emigrés, victims of the French revolution,* who took up their abode in the little rustic town and its flowery dependencies. Polite, inoffensive people enough (being shorne of the power to do evil), who lived down the then rabid prejudices of the towns-folks-thinned, it was thought, the frogs in the vicinity of the ponds, overstocked the scholastic market with French teachers: but they did more than this, they introduced many social refinements, and being for the most part well-born and highly-bred, made the most charming hosts and hostesses, with no better means of entertainment than the indispensable card-table of the period; good conversation, coffee, eau de sucre; and for the young people, if any were present, an impromptu dance-the Cotillon, was I think, in favour just then.

In the meanwhile Mrs. Barbauld, who, as Miss Aiken had written several things, amongst them a critical essay for an ornamented edition of Akenside's" Pleasures of Imagination," and who had been for years mixed up with literary people, especially the Richardson set, began to be regarded as one of the celebrities of Hampstead. Here, upon the Heath, where Constable came for his trees, and skies, and matchless corn-fields-surrounded by all that could animate her love of the Creator through the contemplation of his works, we can imagine her thinking out, in sun and shade, the fair thoughts that shaped themselves into her sweet hymns for children, which reappear from season to season with perennial interest, though we should not wonder if she "Tame ranked amongst Horace Walpole's Geniuses," and know that Dr. Johnson thought lightly of her talents. Yet, as we have just

A far greater number flocked to Summers-Town, Hoxton, &c.

At this present writing a new edition is advertised December, 1868.

said, her hymns are read, while "Rassalas" is forgotten!

In 1798, another of the clever women of the period, Miss Mary Galton (afterwards Mrs. Schennelpennick) shone at the coterie in Church-row-where she spent a month with Mrs. Barbauld, for whom she ever entertained kind and grateful feelings, and a high estimate of her powers.

In one of Mrs. Barbauld's letters (without date), but which evidently refers to the` Letitia, Aikin's days, she writes that she had seen Sir Walter Scott, the lion of the London season: it was on a fine summer's-day, when all the world was abroad but her brother, sister, and herself. This was not the only visit, by the way, that Sir Walter paid Hampstead.

In 1800, we find Mrs. Barbauld writing of her friend Joanna Bailles's "Tragedy of De Montford." "I have received great pleasure lately from the representation of De Montford, a tragedy which you probably read a year andı half ago, in a volume entitled a 'Series of Plays on the Passions.' I admired it then, but little dreamed I was indebted for my entertainment to a young lady whom I visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld's meetings, all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line. The play," she adds, "is admirably played by Mrs. Siddons and Kemble, and is finely written, with great purity of sentiment, and beauty of diction, strength, and originality of character, but is open to criticism." In this year, in the first month of it rather, Hampstead lost one of its remarkable inhabitants by the death of George Stevens, the Shakesperian commentator, who for several years had resided at the Upper Flask, and died there on the twenty-second of January, 1800.

Partly for safety-sake, and partly in his eagerness to forward the publication of his last edition, he was wont to leave Hampstead with the patrol at a very early hour of the morning, and walk to the chambers of a friend in Staple's Inn, of which he had a key, and here he devoted the short hours of the morning to the task of correcting the press. The author of the "Pursuit of Literature" very happily alludes to this circumstance

"Him still from Hampstead journeying to his book,
Aurora oft for Cephalus mistook,

What time he brushed her dews with hasty pace
To meet the printer's devil face to face."

At this time, and for years afterwards, the flelds as far as Hampstead and Highgate, of which (in 1759) the windows of Gray's lodgings in Southampton-row "commanded all the view," remained unbnilt on. The New Road, cut through level fields and marketgardens, from Tottenham-court Road to Battlebridge, made a more direct path to that ancient place of resort the Bowlling-green House," about midway on the south side of it. While a few houses near old St. "Pankeridge" Church, and the Mother Red Cap were the

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only interruptions to the view from Bedford House and the Foundling. These fields, as well as the direct road to Hampstead and Highgate, were so haunted by footpads and ruffians, that solitary passengers were terrified to go from or return to town after night-fall. An old gentleman-who remembered Hampstead in 1809-10, and the fair at North-end, to which people in those days were wont to resort "to eat gingerbread, ride hobby-horses, hear musical clocks, and see tall Lancashire women"-informed me that the more respectable part of the company were accustomed to wait until the soldiers who attended it were recalled to barracks; and when the drummer went round the fair, they fell in with the military and returned to town under their escort.

In 183 (the year of the war of the Revolution), the whole country being roused by the fear of impending invasion, we find a military spirit stirring the inhabitants of Hampstead and its neighbourhood, and a meeting of volunteers, 700 strong, took place upon the Heath, to elect officers and take the oaths; it was on an August afternoon, and I leave the scene to the imagination of my readers. There was the more excitement from the fact that, on the Sunday previous, as if to give force to his assurance by the sacredness of the day and the place, the Attorney General had met them in the church, and had solemnly refuted a mischievous report that the corps would be incorporated with the regulars. It was in the church also, in the December following, that Lady Alvanly, after their solemn dedication (a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance), presented the volunteers with their colours. What an event for the pleasant little town, brimming over, as it must have been, with patriotisn at the time, and what a sight for the boys at Rochmont Barbauld's, in Church Row!

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It was at this time, when the principal amusements at Hampstead were, what they had been for some time previous at Tunbridge Wells, gaming and going to church," that Dr. Bliss, a resident practitioner, bethought him of writing an analytical description of Hampstead waters, in return for which the Hygeia of the Wells enabled him to discover a new medical spring in Pond-street. But the treatise appears to have had as little effect as the discovery in bringing back company to the town. The fashion of the place, which had continued for half a century, had gone out.

But though Fashion turned her fickle smiles elsewhere, and distant spas were preferred to the healing ones at home, there still remained sufficient passenger traffic between Hampstead and the metropolis to employ several stagecoaches daily upon the road.

One of the few original habitations remaining in the town is the coach-office, just above the entrance to the Well-walk from the Highstreet, at a formidable distance from the Hill and Upper Heath.

Here, where the modern omnibus takes in

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or deposits its crowded freight at sixpence per head from the City, the High-flyer" "Tally-ho!" of those days set down or took up its passengers at more than half as many shillings for the same distance two shillings and sixpence to Battle Bridge and Holborn, and I know not how much more to the City, if inclination or the weather induced one to take an inside place! A friend,* who remembers when the coach-office was "Hamilton's," tells me that, from thence to the corner of the Newroad, the fare (outside) was eighteen-pence.

A pleasant drive enough it must have been, in broad daylight and fair weather, through open country as far as Oxford-road in remoter years, and even after the commencement of the present century, past meadows and market-gardens to Tottenham Court Road.

It was Doctor Johnstone who said that a man of intellect could find matter for observation and remembrance in a Hampstead stage; and it was in a Hampstead stage, long afterward, that Shelley astonished the only inside passengera stiffly-silent old lady, who, after the fashion of English matrons, says Leigh Hunt, "maintained-in spite of many attempts to provoke a conversation--what she considered a dignified silence," by breaking out involuntarily, as was his wont, with a quotation from Shakespeare, and exclaiming, "For God's-sake, Hunt,

"Let's talk of graves, and worms, and epitaphs:
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth:
Let's choose executors, and talk of wills!'"'

-a choice of subjects which made the old gentlewoman look as if she fancied herself in the society of one Bedlamite at least! This reminds us that the natural beauty of the place, more potent than its sanitary reputation, drew hither, either as visitors residents, a succession of men and women, whose names literature will not easily let pass away.

Though Pope, and Armstrong, and Akenside, Stevens, and the Barbaulds "have vanished and gone down to the grave, others have come up in their stead"-Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, "Elia," Hazlett, Coleridge, and others of that bright band of nineteenth century intelligences, whose immortality may be said to have begun on earth.

Do any of my readers know the group of pretty, but secluded houses in Heath Vale, lying in a deep hollow, surrounded with greenery, and with a steep bank in front, leading up to the main road, past Jack Straw's Castle?-a spot that suggested to a whimsical, but unpoetical friend, the idea of living in a hand-basin, and seeing the flies move round the rim, as the people walked upon the edge of the Heath. Here, in the first of them (Heath Lodge, at present the residence of the Lovells, the talented authors of "The Wife's Secret" and "Ingomar," whose hospitable friendship the

* Valentine Bartholomew, Esq.

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