Middlesex

ights closing the vista up northward openings from Oxford Street. Hampstead r

e classes, and a holiday resort for the masses, with suburblets and dependencies of its own in once outlying hamlets like South Hill, North End, Child

ut of sand and gravel has but increased the picturesque irregularity; and even the enclosures filched from the common in former days add a charm of contrast, where the richer greenery of private groves or avenues masses itself above the

shifting lo

nd dells, trees o

, with smoking

evelling in

what a range, wi

nd; woods that le

les, with billo

kening pines and

scents on which stately mansions, snug villas, and tumbledown cottages stand huddled together; and trim suburban roads are still here and there lined with the remains of park-like avenues. Hampstead

ate well at Hampstead became a resort, like other wells about London that had long enjoyed a name as miraculous remedies. The Hampstead Spa, still commemorated in Well Walk, soon came to be a scene of idle diversion and heady revels, more like to kill than cure, about which the village of lodgings grew fast, as Defoe notes, "even on the very steep of the Hill, where there's no walking Twenty yards together without Tugging up a Hill or straddling down a Hill." Several other pleasure-grounds sprang up in the vicinity, such as the once-famed Belsize Gardens, the most noble that Pepys ever saw, before the mansion was turned into a "folly-house," precursor of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. This suburban Vanity Fair advertised among its attractions "twelve stout fellows completely armed to patrol between Belsize and London"-a guard which had to be increased as robbers swarmed lik

In the age of wigs and waistcoats we have glimpses of Steele, Addison, Goldsmith, Johnson, the Kit Cat Club, and, indeed, almost all the literary notabilities, as occasional lodgers or visitors; then about

'S FROM

us of a constellation of lawyers, when the great Lord Mansfield settled here, and had for neighbour on the heath the eloquent Erskine; while Rosslyn House, lower down, was the seat of Wedderburn, another judge whose name is held in less honour-all three poor Scottish cadets who grew

piles! Look along the feet of these yet green and smiling hills-east and west, far and wide comes up, as it were, a giant army to desolate and trample them down. See that front rank of the great house-army, far as the eye can reach before you, and on either hand, coming on with a step 'steady as time and inexorable as death.'" The same writer records attempts of successive Sovereigns to limit the growth of the capital, but no Canute could stay the

ne. When this was a newly-made terminus, I lived on the top of Hampstead Hill, and my way home was by a field-path, with a bad name for garrotters, that is now Fitzjohn's Avenue, the smartest and most expensive street in North London, though architectural purists may gnash their teeth over its eclectic amenities. Its young trees, now beginning to give some shade to the seats along this broad avenue, lead up to the Church quarter, where old buildings have mainly gone down before new ones, but still Church Row shows a blotched face of mellow comeliness from the days when Mrs. Barbauld kept a school here; and the Soldiers' Orphan Asylum to the right represents at least the site of what was Bishop Butler's home,

by G. E. Mitton. Edited by Sir

of prospect and several notable graves. Here is buried Sir James Mackintosh, the reformer so warmly praised by Macaulay. Close to each other lie two old neighbours at Hampstead, Lucy Aikin and Joanna Baillie, who share the f

with e

d, with Nature

h, is Constable's, painter of so many scenes from his "sweet Hampstead," which has had as strong attraction for artists as for poets. Collins, Romney, Linnell, Blake, Clarkson Stanfield, were some of those familiar here. In the extension of the burial-ground across

ROW, HA

nt, recorded by a tablet, on a house off the right of the main road, as being level with the top of St. Paul's. If one stray too far to the right, the spire of Christ Church makes a beacon towards the Lower Heath, by the edge of which is the way up from Hampstead Heath Station, passing, below this church, the tall elms of the Well Walk, that was the centre of Spa gaieties. If one bear rather to

e to the right being the dome of St. Paul's, and to the left the spire of Harrow-on-the-Hill, rising over the Welsh Harp Water, with, perhaps, a glimpse of Windsor Castle. Bounded more closely to th

ost the sanitary reputation it had when Leigh Hunt lived here, visited by Keats, Shelley, and other disciples of the "Cockney Poet" school. Beside it is the highest of the chain of ponds separating Hampstead Heath from Highgate Fields, going to fill that "river of wells" which once ran above ground as the Fleet, so much of a river that an eighteenth-century picture in the Guildhall shows barges riding upon it at Holborn; and so late as Victorian days its upper bed could be traced beside the Fleet Road that records it below

le the Hendon Road, dividing the Upper Heath into its west and north sections. Above the latter the ridge road runs straight on to that other old hostelry, the "Spaniards," in the garden of which Mrs. Bardell was arrested while carousing with her friends on the elusive profits of her action against Mr. Pickwick. A landmark at this further end is the conspicuous group of Italian p

ephant. Beyond this, among a cluster of refreshment-houses, across the Hendon Road, their doyen is the "Bull and Bush," with its old-fashioned garden, traditional resort of Addison, Garrick, Hogarth, Sterne, and other celebrities. Next is reached the double hamlet of North End and Wildwood, a charmingly secluded group of cottages and mansions, one of them North End House, famed as the gloomy retreat of the great Lord Chatham. We might hence gain the Hend

mentary avenue of storm-beaten pines near which Erskine House stands beside the "Span

ARDS ROAD

s kept by a man who seems to have passed for a Spaniard among his neighbours, of one of whom he well earned grateful favour. When Lord Mansfield's town-house had been burned by the mob, a

like others of our aristocracy, by marrying a Chicago millionaire's daughter, they might choose rather to sell such a valuable property, which as yet has been kept safe from the suburban builder. But the episcopal estate on the other side of the road has ceased to

less wild than the adjacent playground, but fitter for the games that spangle this expanse of open slopes. Towards the north side will be seen a tree-planted tumulus, about which hangs some misty popular legend of the flight from Boadicea's defeat at Battle Bridge by the Fleet River, close to King's Cross Station. It has been opened and explored, though not thoroughly, without any remains being discovered. On the southern edge swells up

its colonization. So, on the height rising from a welter of lower suburbs, it better preserves the roomy amenities of the time when "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate ... a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma, his Dodona oak-grove whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon"; and among other

whose mother was Coutts the banker's daughter, and her father Sir Francis Burdett, that firebrand of radical reform, cooling down in later years so as to be taunted with his "recant of patriotism"-epigram which seems a reading backwards of Horace Walpole's gibe against Whitfield, who "had not recanted, only canted." This lady's great wealth fell to her by inheritance through the will of her maternal grandfather's second wife, a marked figure in the society of

een Victoria's carriage when the horses had almost run away down a hill that at any pace should be descended with caution. On the right stands the Church, a modern one, notable for its far-seen spire, and for the monument inside to S. T. Coler

makes it the finest of London's burial-grounds, having from the terrace at the top an open view over the northern suburbs, too much blocked up by private enclosures on ot

ortal dead w

better by th

have sat down is seen incorporated in a lamp-post a little way up the hill. In our day, with his last copper, he might have rested his stiff legs in a cable tramcar, soon carrying him above a roar of traffic that would drown Bow Bells, even if they had not to be rung gingerly for fear of bringing down their tower. Higher up, where Hornsey Lane goes off to Crouch End, he would pass a Roman Catholic church and monastery, whose dome makes a landmark from more than one point of view. Above this comes Waterlow Park, the

en from the windows of the Gatehouse could be seen a dozen other hostelries, their common sign those famous horns that proclaimed them a resort of junketing Cockneys, who, as well as passing travellers, received the freedom of Highgate by "swearing on the horns." This was a burlesque pleasantry of more or less coarse features, which long survived through the rites of libation kept up to the profit of that conservative trade, the licensed victuallers. An essential part of the ceremony was a fee drunk for the good of the house. The origin of it is obscure, but it may have arisen as a verbal play on drinking from a horn, as seems to have be

eat. This brings us into the present highroad at Highgate Station, where turns off the way to Muswell Hill beside Highgate Woods, a trim pleasure-ground of lawns and low thickets traversed by arched alleys and glades, in which one might well forget being not yet clear of London subur

s it was once a chapelry of the parish whose name seems better represented by the old form Harringay, "field of hares," as it may well have been, like its namesake at the opposite end of the county. Hornsey's new Church overshadows an ivied tower of the old one, beside which the most distinguished tomb is that of Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, whose first pleasures of memory belonged to Stoke Newington Green. Tom Moore lived for a time at Muswell Hill, in a cottage named "Lalla Rookh," said to have been formerly a

GH

ent, Highgate Hill standing in the middle of London, would appear now no

w that it is public property its fortunes seem to be on the mend. The building contains much the same quasi-educational attractions as the Crystal Palace, combined with all the fun of a fair. Inside is boasted the "greatest cycle track in the world," and the lower part of the park on the Tottenham side was laid out as a race-course. On the higher side, ab

don, one sees Middlesex in its more characteristic aspect of waves of land swelling out of green troughs and breaking into a foam of structures of all shapes and sizes, from tombstones to palaces. This scenery we can best explore b