Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

ea of Romney's, his son tells us, "to form a complete Gallery of Casts, and to open it to any youths of respectability," and in his closing years, after he had removed

ional Club. "It was to Hampstead that Hayley's friend Romney, the painter, retired in the decline of his life," writes J. T. Smith, in Nollekens and his Times, "when he built a dining-room close to his kitc

HOUSE.

brought his wife to London, nor visited her, nor ever saw her again until he was dying. On April 28, 1799, Hayley called on him for the last time at Hampstead, and thought that "increasing weakness of body and mind afforded only a gloomy prospect for the residue of his life." Then in July Flaxman saw him, and says in one of his letters, "I and my father dined at Mr. Romney's at Hampstead last Sunday, by particular invitation, and were received in the most cordial manner; but, alas! I was g

ceived him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney's pictures!-even as a matter of art, I am sure." It is this beautifu

e-you

my forehead. Yo

. I am a tro

your forgiveness

me too much g

n the Master

children drag

lodestar in the

m the household

that har

m you, leaves

still, and wh

ack before I

d world's basta

damn me with th

ouch of my te

yriad lies tha

every man that

band, this fine

Six feet deep

comments! Ay, bu

ng peals from H

all her graves,

ife and childre

My word?' a

rt,' why, that wo

ead who wait t

ins than min

nay, the ruth

bowstrung Har

glare at me, an

the worm who

ives a widow-

n for a

my head upon

art,' on this fo

ends-and many-

e than when we

e, or fancy

ss touches heav

ve me, you ar

ds a light on

August 1821, "I am as much here as possible with my family. My placid and contented companion and her three infants are well. I have got a room at a glazier's where is my large picture, and at this little place I have many small works going on, for which purpose I have cleared a shed in the garden, which held sand, coals, mops and brooms, and have made it a workshop. I have done a good deal here." Lower Terrace is within a few minutes' walk of the Heath, the scenery of which appears in so many of Constable's paintings. He removed presently to Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square; one of his pictures exhibited in the Louvre made him famous in France, and his fame was spreading in England when he went back to Hampstead in 1826, and after staying for a while at 25 Downshire Hill (which has since been rebuilt

N K

. CHARLOT

Other famous Hampstead residents buried in this churchyard are Mrs. Barbauld, who lived in Church Row, then near the foot of Rosslyn Hill, and died in John Street; Sir Walter Besant, who died at Frognal End, near the to

E. WINDMILL H

describing the Christmas sports he had been holding at his house, Dickens says he has purchased the entire stock-in-trade of a conjuror, and that "in those tricks which require a confederate I am assisted (by reason of his imperturbable good humour) by Stanfield, who always does his part exactly the wrong way, to the unspeakable delight of all beholders. We come out on a small scale to-night" (31st December 1842) "at Forster's, where we see the old year out and the new one in." On the 16th January 1844 (putting Martin Chuzzlewit aside) he is writing to Forster, "I had written you a line pleading Jonas and Mrs. Gamp, but this frosty day tempts me sorely. I am distractingly late; but I look at the sky, think of Hampstead, and feel hideously tempted. Don't come with Mac and fetch me. I couldn't resist if you did"; and a month later, on the 18th February, "Stanfield and Mac have come in, and we are going to Hampstead to dinner. I leave Betsy Prig as

of the Kit-Kat club used to meet in the eighteenth century, and Hogarth and Addison and his friends frequently resorted to the "Bull and Bush" at North End. Akenside lived for a while in Hampstead, and af

scenes, O G

seek, a la

summer holidays at a cottage near the entrance to the Priory, and the Doctor would tear himself away from his loved Fleet Street to pass an occasional day or two there with her; and of recent years Robert Louis Stevenson stayed

'S HOUSE.

ay with them, drove out together to Hampstead Heath. Relics of Dick Turpin are preserved at the Spaniards Inn, a quaint, old-world hostelry that has i

SK. FROM THE

a good Cockney, in Moorfields, over his father's livery stables, and in 1816 went to live with his brother Tom at No. 1 Well Walk, next door to the "Green M

s play through the

cracklings o'er

f the household

ire o'er fra

hymes I search

fixed, as in

re so volub

ll of night ou

birthday, Tom

passes smoo

s of gently w

her pass, an

ld's true joys-er

ace shall bid o

tle but ridicule and abuse from the reviewers; but, much as this must have wounded and mortified his sensitive nature, it was so far from being the cause of his death, as some sentimentalists said it was, that, as you may gather from his correspondence, it did not even discourage him. The Quarterly snubbed him as a copyist of Leigh Hunt, professed to find Endymion so tedious as to be almost unreadable, and saw nothing in it but "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy"; Blackwood's Magazine, referring to his having qualified as a surgeon, sneered "Back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters, pills, ointment-boxes;" and the majority of critics were equally unappreciative. Byron dubbed him "a tadpole of the Lakes," and in divers letters to John Murray says, "There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables that I am ashamed to look at them. No more Keats, I entreat.... Of the praises of the little dirty b

ch men as Cowden Clarke, Wentworth Dilke (who founded the Athen?um), John Hamilton Reynolds, Haydon the painter, and Leigh Hunt, whom he frequently visited at that cottage of his in the Vale of Health, which ought never to have been demolished. For it was the meeting-place, too, of Keats and Shelley, and within it on one occasion, according to Cowd

OUSE. HA

he meeting: "A loose, slack, and not well-dressed youth met me in a lane near Highgate. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he ran back and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand.' 'There is death in that hand,' I said when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, bef

delicious coldness of claret in all its glory'-his own expression." Leigh Hunt writes, "He was under the middle height; and his lower limbs were small in comparison with the upper, but neat and well turned. His shoulders were very broad for his size: he had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up; an eager power, checked and made patient by ill health. Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. His face was rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble action, or a beautiful thought, they would suffuse with tears and his mouth trembled. In this there was ill health as well as imagination, for he did not l

cowering under the wings of great poets, rather than to a bitterness that I am not appreciated. I am anxious to get Endymion printed that I may forget it and proceed." There is a long letter to his sister in 1819, telling her of the books he has been reading, and describing his every-day life, beginning, "The candles are burnt down and I am using the wax taper, which has a long snuff on it-the fire is at its last click-I am sitting with my back to it, with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevat

'S HOUSE.

e world but yourself could do.... I never knew before what such love as you have made me feel was; I did not believe in it; my fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up." And again, "I have been in so irritable a state of health these two or three last days, that I did not think I should be able to write this week.... I have been, I cannot tell why, in capital spirits this last hour. What reason? When I have to take my candle and retire to a lonely room, without the thought, as I fall asleep, of seeing you to-morro

My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you." Even when he is home again, in his own part of the Wentworth Place house, he is writing in February 1820, "They say I must remain confined to this room for some time. The consciousness that you love me will make a pleasant prison of the house next to yours. You must come and see me frequently: this evening without fa

reatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.... I think, without my mentioning it, for my sake, you would be a friend to Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many faults-but, for my sake, think she has not one. If there is anything you can d

RIER'S GRAVE

in other letters that he wrote from Italy, and that were delivered here to Armitage Brown, I