[141] The new paling at the end of the holly hedge shows the place where the nine elms and the old seat stood.

[142] Said by some writers to have been married in 1776—a statement disproved by the magazines of the day, and by the fact of Mrs. Crewe’s magnificent masquerade in 1775. There is a portrait of Mrs. Crewe painted by Reynolds.

[143] The members of this celebrated club included the Dukes of Roxburghe and Portland, the Earl of Strathmore (whose encounter with the highwaymen on Finchley Common I have alluded to), Mr. Crewe, Fox, Sheridan, Lord Carlisle, and others. The club was established in Pall Mall in 1764, and the proprietor in 1775 founded the present Brooks’s, in St. James’s Street.

[144] Mirabeau, in one of his letters, tells of two ladies just arrived from Paris with tall feathers in their hats, who, as he was conducting them from the Bell Inn, Holborn, to Hatton Garden, were surrounded by a mob, from whom they were only rescued by some English gentlemen on horseback, who used their whips on the crowd, and thus dispersed it.

[145] Sir Aston Lever, who had just made a present of his collection to the British Museum.

[146] Fox’s verses to Mrs. Crewe were printed at Strawberry Hill.

[147] On his death-bed Fox observed: ‘There are two things I wish heartily to see accomplished—peace with Europe, and the abolition of the slave-trade; but of the two, I wish the latter.’

[148] While rewriting this chapter, a sale of Romney’s engravings took place at Christie’s, when Lady Hamilton as ‘Nature,’ engraved in colours by Meyer, sold for 100 guineas (May, 1894).

[149] This picture, I am told, is not by Romney.

[150] It must be patent to everyone that, had the Assembly House been originally built for that purpose, a proper entrance would have formed an essential part of it, whereas, as I have said, it was without one till quite modern times.

[151] I am indebted to Mr. G. W. Potter for the above information.

[152] The birch-tree, with its light sprays and silvery bark, is very frequently styled the ‘Lady of the Woods.’ Constable used the appellation in connection with the beautiful ash metaphorically.

[153] ‘Goldsmith’s English, when English comes to be the sole tongue wanted to run the wide world round, as it spins by day and night under the sun, will necessarily be more and more resorted to as the best model to be had of plain and simply effective speech. His “Village” and his “Vicar” will be carefully searched into to help counteract the ever-augmenting virus of vulgar dialectical debasement from oversea offshoots, colonial or enfranchised, that is to-day poisoning the living font of Chaucer. Addison will then be less read than even now he is, and Johnson will never be sought for at all out of Boswell. The huge autocrat of yesterday is with the worms to-morrow, and Oliver, “who talked like poor Poll,” will then sit enthroned as preceptor of English to the universe.’—Mr. C. A Ward.

[154] I am reminded that Mr. Richardson, the friend and correspondent of Sir W. Scott, resided here for several years.

[155]

DE MONTFORT: A TRAGEDY.

PLAYED FOR THE FIRST TIME AT DRURY LANE, APRIL 29, 1800.

Characters.

[156] ‘Life of Sir Walter Scott,’ vol. ii., pp. 267, 268.

[157] Sir Walter Scott paid his last visit to Hampstead and Joanna Baillie in April, 1828. It might have been on this occasion that Mrs. Howitt met him.

[158] To-day the inscription on her tomb needs the tender hand of Old Mortality to remove the lichen that hides it!

[159] Athenæeum, March 20, 1861.

[160] There is but one good portrait of Goldsmith—that painted by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds, now at Knowle.

[161] Loggan had been dwarf to the Princess of Wales. He kept a hairdresser’s shop on the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, and painted fans, which were ornamented with likenesses of all the most important persons who appeared there.

[162] See p. 165.

[163] At this time Miss Aikin had published her ‘Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth,’ and Miss Edgeworth was writing ‘Comic Dramas.’

[164] It will be remembered that the Hoare family allied themselves by marriage with the Norfolk Gurneys, the Buxtons, and the Frys.

[165] This name is now given to a row of poor little modern dwellings at North End.

[166] I find it is a tradition in one of the oldest families on Hampstead Heath that this avenue formerly belonged to Lord North’s House.

[167] Mr. G. W. Potter tells me a very aged walnut-tree still stands in this paddock, and may be the tree referred to.

[168] It shows a want of archæological interest to have altered the name.

[169] Dryden.

[170] North End House is now the residence of Mr. Figgis; and I read in Baines’ ‘Records of Hampstead’ that the room fraught with such sad interest is used as a day-nursery.

This does not appear to be the description of a room that would adapt itself, or be capable of adaptation to the uses of a day-nursery; and we sincerely hope that Mr. Baines has been misinformed, and that the room remains as when Mr. Howitt described it, sacred to the memory of the great orator.

[171] I have several times been in this historic room, and visited it only last summer with the Hampstead Antiquarian Society. The room is a double one: the smaller apartment has the double-hatch door, and the larger room opening from it is quite large enough for a nursery. The tradition is that the Earl of Chatham occupied the double apartment.—G. W. P.

[172] Horace Walpole, who also vindicated Byng, and regarded his fate as a gross injustice, or, rather, we should say, a judicial murder, tells us that, being with Her Royal Highness Princess Amelia at her villa of Gunnersbury, amongst other interesting anecdotes, she told him that while Byng’s affair was depending, the Duchess of Newcastle sent Lady Sophia Egerton (the wife of a clergyman, by the way) to beg her to be for the execution of the Admiral. ‘And, indeed,’ she continued, ‘I was already for it. The officers would never have fought if he had not been executed; nor would Lord Anson have been head of the Admiralty.’

[173] I have seen it this year (1895), and rejoice at its healthy appearance.

[174] Tom Hood.

[175] The bower or seat at the Bull and Bush is about 12 feet from the ground, among the branches of the yew-tree, and is reached by a rude staircase. The tree was a very ancient one, but a ring of young shoots have sprung up from the roots, and are growing vigorously round the spot where the old trunk stood.—G. W. P.

[176] Hughson’s ‘History of London,’ 1809.

[177] This well-known physician has died since these lines were written.

[178] These fields are now covered with houses.

[179] Mrs. Barbauld’s ‘Richardson’s Correspondence.’

[180] I believe the elm has been preserved, but the house has been removed.

[181] Mr. Le Breton, who heard him, says it was the first large elm-tree on the Heath.

[182] The Park, Brussels.

[183] Said to have been one of the most reliable of Charles Kean’s stock pieces.

[184] Leigh Hunt and his brother had been condemned to two years’ imprisonment each, and a fine of £1,000, for having, as he ludicrously phrases it, contrasted the Morning Post’s description of the Regent as an Adonis in appearance, and the Mæcenas of his age, with the old real, fat state of the case, and for having said that H.R.H. had lived for fifty years without doing anything to deserve the admiration of his contemporaries or the gratitude of posterity.

[185] A tradition of the inhabitants of the cottage when I saw it.

[186] These lines do not appear in ‘Sleep and Poetry,’ in Moxon’s edition in the Pocket Series.

[187] Old John Cleave, the publisher, and friend of Douglas Jerrold and William Linton, who visited Leigh Hunt in his Surrey cage, told me that not only were the walls covered with a rose-patterned paper, but that the poet had trained living roses on them.

[188] Vide Mary Cowden Clarke.

[189] Millfield Lane is said to be a very ancient road. This was the road traversed by the mounted messenger in 1780 who was despatched for the military, while the would-be wreckers of Lord Mansfield’s house were being regaled by the landlord of the Spaniards Inn.

[190] A fungus so called.

[191] Hammond’s house was in Elm Row.

[192] Some persons have asserted that Lord Byron was one of Leigh Hunt’s visitors in the Vale of Health, but Hunt himself tells us that though Lord Byron visited him in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, he did not afterwards. His interviews with Lord Byron took place at his lordship’s town-house.

[193] In the garden of which her three-year-old son celebrated his mother’s birthday by eating laburnum seeds, which nearly killed him.

[194] Those who have had experience of forestry consider the mighty beeches and oaks in Caen Wood to be the real descendants of the primeval giants of the old Forest of Middlesex.

[195] Lloyd’s ‘Caen Wood and its Associations.’ A lecture.

[196] State Calendars of Charles I. and II., April 24, 1630, and September 21, 1660.

[197] There is a tradition that the ponds were enlarged, if not made, by the Monks (Lloyd).

[198] The old mill has still a local tradition in Millfield Lane, by which it was approached from the hamlet of Green Street, Kentish Town (ibid.).

[199] Haydn.

[200] The South Sea Scheme, thus called.

[201] Lloyd.

[202] It was Lord Bute who granted Dr. Johnson a literary pension of £300 a year.

[203] Here are all the letters—Kaen, Caen.

[204] The inscription was as follows: ‘I, Robert Caxton, begun this place in a wild wood ... stubbed up the wood, digged all the ponds, cut all the walks, made all the gardens, built all the rooms with my own hands. Nobody drove a nail here, or laid a brick, or a tile, but myself; and ... thank God for giving me strength at sixty-four years of age, when I began it,’ etc.

[205] Edited by Colley Cibber.

[206] Mr. G. W. Potter informs me, that while a skating pond was being enlarged about seven or eight years ago, traces of this strange building were found.

[207] It was said of Murray, that he had less law than many lawyers, but more practice than any. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was one of his clients.

[208] Referred to in a speech, at a City banquet, by Sir Bartle Frere, July, 1874.

[209] ‘Lives of the Lord Chancellors.’

[210] Ibid.

[211] That of the claimant to the Tichborne baronetcy.

[212] It is curious to notice the different description of the event which Mrs. Delany (writing at the same time as Horace Walpole) gives us, the latter averring that the Guards, a thousand strong, had been despatched to prevent the intended arson, whilst the lady writes that the mob was met by a regiment of militia on the march, who turned them back. It is plain that Horace Walpole’s description was correct, otherwise there would have been no obligation to the landlord of the Spaniards, which, it is said, Lord Mansfield never forgot.

[213] Abraham states that the Spaniards Tavern paid no poor rate. There may be no relation between the facts, but as cause is wanted for this exemption, one wonders if the saving of Caen Wood had anything to do with it.

[214] More than £30,000 by the burning of his house.

[215] ‘Lives of the Lord Chancellors.’

[216] Lambert tells us that amongst the celebrated cedars of Lebanon at Caen Wood, young when he saw them, was one planted by Lord Mansfield himself.

[217] The ‘Man Milliner,’ as a correspondent of the European Magazine writes himself, suggests in the August number of that year (1781) that Lord Southampton at Fitzroy Farm might with advantage stucco the front of his three rooms to the west. His neighbour Lord Mansfield’s south front will show him the permanent beauty of the new stucco.

[218] I have been told that this portrait is still preserved at Caen Wood House.

[219] The freeholders and copyholders of the manor did not even receive the courtesy of a notice of the intention to bring in the Bill, which was almost surreptitiously passed through the House.

[220] Prints of the handsome arch were treasured in Hampstead homes long after the event. One of them, coloured and gilt, is now before me, rather the worse for sixty-three years’ wear and tear.

[221] The Styrian Hunters were a band of foreign musicians so called, very popular in London just then.

[222] This was written in 1872 before the great hillocks had been levelled, or the pits and hollows filled up.

[223] It is the belief of geologists that the whole of Middlesex was the bed of an estuary of the sea, from which the waters subsided into the Thames.

[224] A lady whose girlhood was spent at Hampstead tells me she used to find bright little stones amongst the gravel, locally known as ‘Hampstead diamonds’; a ring made of them, in her possession, still sparkles very prettily.

[225] These have been found in the gravel-pits, and also a specimen of Concha rugosa.

[226] Authors of the ‘History of Clerkenwell,’ London, 1828.

[227] So called because formed of the united streams which supplied the city and suburbs with clear, sweet, and wholesome water in the west part, whose first decay was owing to certain mills erected thereon by the Knights of St. John, and by degrees gave it the name of Turnmill Brook, which name is still preserved in Turnmill Street, through part of which it took its course. In time this name was lost in that of Fleet Dyke or Ditch.

[228] There is a mystery about this Walk which, when I first knew Hampstead, I often heard spoken of. Now I am told, on very reliable authority, that no such Walk exists; yet the above traditional account of the course of the Fleet was given me as late as 1895 by a very intelligent inhabitant, and he spoke of Willow Walk as if he knew it.

[229] After great falls of snow or heavy rains, the Fleet frequently overflowed the Pancras valley and the Bagnigge Wells Road, rendering them impassable in places.

[230] The Holborn Bars are removed, but the posts stand.

[231] These latter buildings, or part of them, I am told, are still in being, and used for their original purpose.

[232] A celebrated house, much frequented by the wits. This mention of Nando’s Coffee-house reminds me that it figures in one of the amusing papers in the Tatler (No. 180), which Steele had started in 1709. In this paper the public are informed that ‘a coach runs daily from Nando’s Coffee House to Mr. Tiptoe’s Dancing School’; and then is added by way of postscript, ‘Dancing shoes not exceeding four inches height in the heels, and periwigs not exceeding three feet in length, are carried in the coach box gratis,’ a satire upon the high heels and exaggerated wigs then in vogue.

[233] There was, I am told, an old weather-boarded house opposite the Wells Tavern called Willow House, which remained till some twenty years ago, when its site, and that of its large garden, were built upon, and six or more houses were erected there. This was probably the type of the early houses in Well Walk.

[234] There was a coach running in 1708.

[235] See Haydn’s ‘Dictionary of Dates.’

[236] Bank Holidays, though in the near future, had not been inaugurated when this was first written.

[237] Gibson, who published his additions to Camden at the Black Swan, Paternoster Row, 1695, tells us that Mr. Pittiver found what he calls cluster-headed goldy-locks (Ranunculus bulbosus?) in going from Mother Huffs’ to Highgate. Mother Huffs’ would seem to have been situated pretty near the Spaniards Inn, and was in all likelihood a tea-drinking house.

[238] The murderer of a Mr. Posto.

[239] The Bird-in-Hand, like the old post-office, was said to be of the same age as the Chicken House.

[240] This ungraceful adjunct to dress was flourishing when these lines were first written (1852-53).

[241] I respect the unknown hand that appended the above newspaper cutting to Soames’ ‘Treatise on the Hampstead Wells,’ in the reference-room of the Hampstead Library.

[242] In 1721 the tavern in Well Walk was called the White Stone Inn.

[243] Anderson’s ‘Life of Gay.’

[244] In this same year, 1722, I find Gay writing to Swift that he is persuaded Pope had borne his share in the loss of the South Sea—a sentence that says much for the fortitude and unselfish forbearance of the latter who had taught himself in this instance to forget his own loss in endeavouring to strengthen and comfort his friend and fellow-sufferer.

[245] Lady Betty Germain, second daughter to Earl Berkeley, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, to whom Swift was either private secretary or chaplain, or both(?). Visitors to Knowle will remember Lady Betty’s chamber, and the bed-hangings, chair-covers, etc., of the lady’s own embroidering.

[246] This description is repeated in every edition of this work, long after the Assembly-room had ceased to exist, and is given verbatim in several topographical descriptions of Hampstead.

[247] That this too ambidextrous individual visited Hampstead is well known. But so she did Belsize and Ranelagh, as well as the opera, the theatres, and, indeed, the churches—every place, in fact, where well-dressed persons congregated. Many years ago an old inhabitant of Hampstead lent me a scrap-book in which was a likeness of Jenny Diver, a by no means unpleasant-looking woman. She was represented with an ostentatious display of pearls and other ornaments round her neck and waist. She held a watch in one hand, and a purse in the other, and under a cap wore her hair turned back from a rather clever forehead; the remainder, while tied behind with a ribbon, fell in loose curls upon her neck. Gay introduces her in the ‘Beggars’ Opera.’ According to the text, she was demure-looking. March, 1740, closed Jenny’s career at Tyburn.

[248] The daughters of Mrs. Hervey.

[249] It could not have been the Marriage Act that put an end to it, as that was not passed till 1753, and Sion Chapel had ceased to be before 1725.

[250] Connoisseur.

[251] Dr. Arbuthnot died in March, 1734-35.

[252] He was a Scotchman. Letter of Mr. Pulteney to Swift. See ‘Correspondence.’

[253] I am told that this custom is still maintained.

[254] This is precisely the language of Jonas Hanway, the traveller, and introducer of that useful article, the umbrella. This was also the favourite argument of the clergy, when preaching against the use of tea, as they also did against vaccination.

[255] I am told by an old resident that as late as 1830 there was but one butcher’s shop in Hampstead.

[256] A ridiculous custom, of which an account will be found in Hone’s ‘Table Book.’

[257] Connoisseur.

[258] Quoted in ‘Hampstead and the Heath,’ which appeared in Sharpe’s Magazine early in the sixties.

[259] Twelve months later, 1736, Turpin rides on the Highgate road, wearing an open gold-laced hat, while his companion (who sometimes passes for his man) has a plain gold-laced hat.

[260] He was Court painter to George II., and the translator of ‘Don Quixote.’ Sir Joshua Reynolds thought so little of his paintings that when asked where they were to be seen he replied, ‘In the garret.’

[261] Tried for bigamy, and found guilty, 1776.

[262] The Duke of Grafton was Lord Chamberlain.

[263] Mrs. Donnellan (the prefix Mrs. was then frequently applied to unmarried ladies) was the daughter of Chief Justice Donnellan, and sister to the Bishop, of Killala. Dr. Clayton married her sister, and gave his wife’s fortune to Mrs. Donnellan, who seems to have passed a great part of her life in England, making Hampstead a frequent place of residence.

[264] The rich and beautiful Widow Pendarves married the Irish Dean Delany, 1732, to the great disgust of John Gay. See his letter to Swift in the correspondence of the latter. ‘As Dr. Delany hath taken away a fortune from us, I expect to be recommended in Ireland. If authors of godly books are entitled to such fortune, I desire you would recommend me as a moral one—I mean in Ireland, for that recommendation would not do in England’ (Swift’s Correspondence).

[265] I have seen it stated that the burial-place of Pope is unknown.

[266] Clergymen extolled ‘Clarissa’ in the pulpit, and Pope observed of ‘Pamela’ that it would do more good than all their sermons.

[267] The Daily Advertiser, September 26, 1748.

[268] William Moray, for robbing John Head, a farmer’s boy, of sixpence (Universal Magazine, February 15, 1775).

[269] About nine o’clock on a July morning, Turpin was seen by two gentlemen who knew him, at Tottenham High Cross, mounted on a gray horse, with a boy behind as servant on a brown horse, with a black velvet cap and silver tassel. He rode through the town without molestation.—Grub Street Journal, 1736, No. 397.

[270] Park’s ‘History of Hampstead,’ published when the author was little more than of age.

[271] Mr. Baines, in his ‘Records of Hampstead,’ has remedied this oversight, and has given some interesting particulars of the young historian’s after-life.

[272] Then the Green Man.

[273] I am told upon excellent authority that the house Constable lived in was taken down and rebuilt about six years ago; this house is now 44, Well Walk.

[274] Sion Chapel.

[275] Mr. G. W. Potter.

[276] Now Tooley’s Farm.

[277] Lintot.