Middlesex

behalf of its northern heights. Yet cyclists and horses might have a good word to say for this plain, over which three main arteries of traffic run

beauty that must be confessed to make oases in a part of th

ing up here a popular pleasure ground. It looks for a little as if the road were getting into open country, but soon the streets of Acton undeceive us, stretching on to Ealing. This Oak Town, whose first record is as pasture-ground for the Bishop of London's pigs, has had noble and notable residents in its time, Baxter's Saints' Rest having been written here, as well as some of Bulwer Lytton's novels. At present it i

Royal to make a permanent show-ground for the Royal Agricultural Society, an experiment that proved a failure. Passing to the left, one soon reaches Twyford Abbey on the bank of the Brent, where green slopes and the remains of a fine avenue seem threatened on all sides. To this smallest parish near London a tributary brook gives the name so common among England's double fords. The modern mansion, titled on surmise of an abbey having once stood here, has quite recently deserved its name by passing to a community of foreign monks, whom the whirligig of time brings to seek refuge in our heretical island. These Cath

famed for wheat, as it now is for hay; and Fuller says of Perivale, what has also been boasted for Heston, near Southall, that it had the honour of supplying flour for the King's table. Perivale Church is in very different case from its luckless neighbour, its ancient structure well restored and well cared for; and,

it now extends for two miles along the road, and on either side has turned private grounds and mansions into streets and playgrounds. On the right rises the dignified quarter of Castlebar Hill, over which are ways to the new park on the Brent; on the left lies Ealing Common, then, further on, Walpole Park, with its fine old timber, thrown open sinc

HOUSE, NEA

rs. Bulwer Lytton also was pupil of a clergyman, with whom he seems to have got on less ill than with most of his instructors. In the upper part of Ealing, near its conspicuous water-tower, stands the Prin

ertainly in Hanwell when the tram-road makes an abrupt drop to cross the valley of the Brent. A little way below, the river becomes merged with the Grand Junction Canal, descending at the back of the Asylum by a chain of locks which recall those of Trollhatta or Banavie on a small scale, beside what seems a mini

Greenford, that has some notable relics under its shingled spire and tiled roof, showing through a clump of trees which help the green meadows to bear out the name of the village. The road through Greenford goes on to Harrow by Greenford Green, whose name does not so well answer to its promise of rusticity. But over the fields beside Greenford Church one may take a mile of footpath leading across the canal to Northholt, alias Northall, another of those real, quaint, roomy villages that surpris

suburb; but in one generation it has waxed to what it is now, a somewhat commonplace outgrowth of London, which for a time was the tram terminus. It has a weekly cattle market as its most bucolic feature; and there are still some pleasant f

f the Archbishops of Canterbury's many seats, the dignity of which seems to survive in the spacious parsonage. The fine restored Church contains some old monuments, notably, beside the altar, S

rough which loom snug farmhouses, but it is else so unpopulated that only one road runs across it, by Yeading to Ruislip and Ickenham. Bold explorers, perhaps, might here find a touch of adventure in trespassing against notices which block approach to that devious brook, over a country of such agricultural note that it is not to be sneezed at unless by

grounds and gardens of goodly mansions; and the golfers, upon whom one of its slopes seems wasted, have a better chance of attending to their game on less comely enclosures passed further back. Should any pedestrian doubt my word for it, let him turn up to the

BR

one, containing brasses and monuments, conspicuous among them the Onslow and Paget tombs on either side

gh, thriving on corn-mills and other industries, has more the look of an independent market town than any in Middlesex. Till lately a certain awkwardness of communications kept Uxbridge rather out of the way, served only by a branch from the Great Western Railway at West Drayton, as it once was by slow canal-boats; but now it has a M

eliberations were held has been much altered, and is now an inn, but it still proudly exhibits itself as the "Treaty House" by the road at the west end of the town, and part of the interior is preserved in its old dignity. The sign of this inn was an inheritance from the "Crown,"

outhwards the road by the river and the canal is not so pleasant, populated by various industries about Cowley, in whose churchyard was buried Dr. Dodd, the divine hanged for forgery, 1777. But opener and more agreeable country is reached at West Drayton, where, having passed its scattered hamlets on the canal, we find hou

by Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Gunnersbury to the busy end of Kew Bridge, lately rebuilt. Beyond, it enters the main street of Brentford, so nar

son satirically coupled its name with Glasgow, in which he showed his ignorance, as all travellers of that century insist on the neatness and prettiness of the Clyde city before its days of grimy wealth. Thomson, in his Castle of Indolence, takes this "town of mud" to be a fit stage for pig-driving, where motor-cars now "gruntle to each other's moan"; Goldsmith unkindly suggests it as goal for a race between "a turnip-cart, a dust-cart, and a dung-cart"; and other contemporary bards affect the same nose-holding attitude towards poor Brentford, their complaints, as a certain guide-book dryly says, being in our day echoed by sanitary inspectors. Of late the squalid county seat sho

ornate gate revealing the grounds. From a right-of-way crossing the park to Isleworth Church on the river bank, can be had a fuller view of the mansion, crow

BRENTFORD:

humberland. The community of nuns long held out at Lisbon, keeping the keys of their English home; but when, a century ago, they showed them to the Duke of that day, he is understood to have bluntly remarked that

d and watered flat which Horace Walpole called the ugliest in the world; but that in our day seems a slander. By a road through it, or round its precinct, one can reach the villages of Norwood Green and Heston, where

d, whose prowess made the journey to Bath an adventure; but there is little trace of its wildness now. It seems to be all enclosed, except the plain to the left occupied by that permanent camp, with its fortification of barbed wire. This was the scene of an interesting experiment made in training a compa

r immortality while immortalizing the worthies of England. The Church, with its monuments, is enclosed in the park of Cranford House, where once stood a Templar preceptory that became a seat of the Berkeleys, whose old nobility flared into a Georgian scandal now growing dim. Thus the autobiographical sportsman, Granville Berkeley, came to be partly brought up here, and has many tales to tell of highwaymen adventures, including that legend of a Bishop who took to the road and was "taken ill" on Hounslow Heath, being fatally shot through the body. This master of hounds cou

On the other side, opposite the by-road from Harlington, could once be traced the outlines of a Roman camp, one of the many connected with C?sar's name. Then at Longford is reached the Colne, hereabout, on the flat edge of Middlesex, splitting itself into tame branches, harnessed to industry. Two of these are artificial, one known as the Duke of Northumberland's River, the other as the Queen's, the Cardinal

. The chief places on the railway are Feltham and Ashford, between which appears to astonished passengers the rigging of a ship on dry land, planted here to instruct the boys of a large industrial school; and other institutions help to swell the population of this vicinity. On the road the most

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a mile to the right of the highroad. Bedfont is understood to have been the old limit of Windsor Park; and the neighbourhood has still some fine trees, as well

of Middlesex as "all ugly," while his detestation of commons provoked him to call Hounslow Heath "a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in look," yet "only a little worse than the general run." It would be the shrinking heaths rath