CHAPTER XV.

_THE WELL WALK—THE EARLY PERIOD._

Every period has produced some specific or other for ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,’ and during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and the early years of the present, mineral waters were the fashionable panacea.

From traditional times the curative properties of the spring in Well Walk had been known to the inhabitants of Hampstead and the neighbourhood. It oozed out of the green hillside to the east of the village into a self-made pool, whose surface was covered with a rust-coloured film that disclosed its ferruginous nature. But something more than a mere local reputation must have suggested to the Hon. Susannah Noel the gift of the ‘medicinal spring, together with six acres of heathland lying about and encompassing it,’ for the sole use and benefit of the poor of Hampstead for ever. The indenture by which this gift is made on her own part and that of her infant son, Baptist, Earl of Gainsborough, is dated December, 1698, and is the foundation of what is known as the Wells Charity.

For some time after the date of this indenture, the project seems to have remained in abeyance, but in the _Postman_ of April 16 and 20, 1700, an advertisement appears, stating that the Hampstead chalybeate waters are ‘so highly approved by the most eminent physicians, that they are by direction of the trustees of the Wells aforesaid, for the convenience of those who yearly drink them in London, carefully bottled up in flasks, and sent to Mr. Phelps, Apothecary, at the Eagle and Child in Fleet Street every morning at the rate of 3d. per flask, and if any persons desire to have them brought to their houses, they will be conveyed to them upon leaving a note at Mr. Phelps’, aforesaid, at 1d. a flask more.’ Here we have the origin of the names given to the two taverns of Upper and Lower Flask, and of the Walk in the vicinity of the latter. It is further stated that ‘the true waters are nowhere else to be procured, unless they are sent for to the Wells, Hampstead.’

An advertisement in the same newspaper (August 27 and 29 of this year) sets forth that:

‘By order of the Trustees of Hampstead Mineral Waters, These are to certify that the Widow Keys is discharged from the Wells, and carries no more of the said waters, the Trustees now only employing Mr. Adams, a potter at Holborn Bars, to deliver out the said mineral waters. If any other person pretends to bring Hampstead waters, they (the purchasers) are desired to try them, so that they be not cheated. Also, the Trustees will let the said waters, with six acres of land, by lease or yearly rent. Such as desire to treat about the same, may meet the Trustees at Craddock’s Coffee-house, Hampstead, every Saturday from 10 to 12 o’clock in the morning untill the 29th of September next.’

This same month and year, in the Court Rolls of Hampstead, it is ordered that ‘the Spring by the purging Well be forthwith brought into the town of Hampstead, at the parish charge, and yt ye money and profit arising thereout be applied to the easing of the poors’ rates hereafter to be made.’

In the early part of 1701, we find the advertisement of the letting of the Wells, and the land attached to them, reappearing in the _Postman_, with the effect of attracting a lessee; for soon after we read of the Wells dwelling-house and tavern, the latter with a very fair bowling-green attached, without which no gentleman of the period would have been pleasurably provided for. Subsequently, tea and coffee rooms and a dancing-room were added, and the new watering-place is announced as ready to receive company.

May was the pleasant month in which the water-drinking season primitively began, though later on, from June till Michaelmas, was considered the best time for taking them. An old advertisement of the opening of the season reads as follows:

‘These are to acquaint all persons that have occasion to drink Hampstead waters that the Wells will be opened on Monday next, being the 11th of May, with very good music for dancing, and will continue every Monday during the season for water-drinking, and there is complete accommodation for water-drinkers of both sexes with accomodation of a very good bowling-green, and very good stabling and coach-house.’[231]

There is a vagueness in the phrasing of this notice that leaves a doubt whether it is the Wells or the music that will continue every Monday, but from other sources we learn that ‘very good music for dancing went on all day long every Monday during the season.’

Dr. Gibbons, who resided at Hampstead, was the first physician who encouraged the drinking of the waters, setting a practical example himself, and continuing in it till his death (1725). Others of his profession supported the opinion of their excellence, and the sale of them in London, as well as their local use, seems to have largely increased in consequence. Instead of one or two agents, the advertisements set forth that, being approved by the most eminent physicians, the said mineral water continues to be brought fresh from Hampstead Wells every day to Mr. Adams, Glass-seller, near Holborn Bars; to Mr. Cresset’s at the Sugar-loaf at Charing Cross; to Nando’s Coffee-house,[232] near Temple Bar; to Sam’s Coffee-house, near Ludgate; to the Salmon in Stock’s Market; and by Mr. Pratt to the Greyhound in King Street, Bloomsbury; to Howe’s Coffee-house in Cheapside by the Half-moon Tavern, and to the Black Posts, Fleet Street.

At this time there was no lack of small but pleasant lodgings to be had in South End, and on the Lower and Upper Heath, weather-boarded structures for the most part of the cottage species, some of which survived till our own time in the Vale of Health and about Squire’s Mount; one of the ancient customs of the Manor of Hampstead being that the tenants of their own free will might ‘let, sell, take down, or remove any of their tenements without any fine or forfeiture to or for the same to the lord,’ a custom that greatly facilitated the raising of inexpensive removable dwellings.

A few of the houses in Well Walk in the early part of the century were probably of this description, and, I suspect, of an earlier date than the flat-faced, narrow-windowed brick edifices with fan-lighted hall doors that faced the Walk in the fifties. Instead of that decorous straight line, I imagine irregularity in the appearance, as well as in the positions, of the original structures, which followed no fixed plan, but were added to as wanted.[233]

Neither do I imagine that the tenements which arose between the date of the advertisement of the letting of the Wells, and that which announces their opening in the summer of the same year (1701) could have been of very solid construction. There was no time for the work that English builders in those days put into the building of brick houses, and everything shows that the preparation for the convenience of visitors to the spa must have been of a hurried, and for the most part of a temporary, nature.

Very soon we read of bun-houses and raffling-shops, which appear to have been set up over against the Long Room, from which some years later Steele crossed over to watch the cheating play in one of them. In deference to the religious wants of the visitors, we find the proprietor of the Wells building a chapel at his own expense, of which I shall have more to say farther on.

Happily, the most interesting, from its associations, of the Wells buildings, the Long Room, still exists in Weatherall Place, a long, low, white structure when I first knew it, of timber, brick and mortar. It has been used as a private residence for quite a hundred years, and a late proprietor, Mr. Routh, has wholly metamorphosed its appearance by having it cased with red brick.

Sion Chapel, which afterwards became notorious in the history of Hampstead, was a much-needed and, for some time, decently conducted place of worship, at which one or other of the many ejected Nonconformist ministers of the time officiated, for even then the ancient chapel of St. Mary (now St. John’s) was almost ruinous, and inadequate to the yearly increasing number of parishioners, and so could afford little, if any, accommodation for strangers.

From 1701 to 1712-13, that happy period when, as Dr. Gibbons tells us, the Wells were frequented by ‘as much and as good company as go yearly to Tunbridge Wells, in Kent,’ the searcher of old newspapers will find concerts of vocal and instrumental music, as well as other entertainments, to have been constantly advertised to take place in the Long Room. The prices of admission to the concerts were one shilling in the morning, and (except on extraordinary occasions) sixpence in the evening, when, ‘for the convenience of gentlemen returning to town,’ the concerts commenced at five o’clock. The early hour is suggestive of the then state of the roads in the suburbs of London. At this period a stage-coach started for Hampstead every morning, from the Greyhound in Holborn, and another from the Chequers, returning at night,[234] besides a carrier daily; but in all probability the coachmen preferred driving home by daylight, not only on account of the roughness of the roads, but to avoid running the risk of being stopped by highwaymen on their track, or at the meeting of the ways at the half-way house, the Old Mother Red-Cap, a place noted for waylaying the coaches, probably from the facility of escape which the divergence of three separate roads afforded.

It happened, fortunately for the fashionable visitors to the Wells, that the summer meetings of the Kit-Cat Club, which had been instituted a few years before (though some say after their opening) coincided with the period of drinking the Hampstead waters, and as people walked after dinner in those days, some one or other of the witty brotherhood would often saunter down from the bosky covert of the gardens of the Upper Flask, or across the Heath from the Bull and Bush, at Wildwood Corner (as Camden calls North End) to greet their friends in the Long Room or in the walks, or look in, as Steele was wont to do (with an eye to copy and the correction of morals), at the cheating play in the raffling-shops, the proprietors of which appear to have been knaves of the worst order. Steele took great pleasure in exposing them. It is to such a passing inquisition that the subscribers to the _Tatler_ in the summer of 1709 owed the witty paper that describes one of these rogues as ‘a person deep in the practice of the law, who, under the name of his maid Sisly, had set up this easier way of conveyancing and alienating estates from one family to another.’

Some years later, the _Spectator_ informs us—probably by the same hand—that ‘a Count figures amongst this fraternity, who is humorously described as “the errantist Count of all the Courts of England,” and who, believing the fair diversion-table at Hampstead to be all foul play, has vouchsafed to set up another himself, in imitation of it.’ The company, under these circumstances, became, we may be sure, considerably mixed; adventurers of both sexes found their way to the upland village, and the idle and profligate, as well as the invalid and ennuyé, mingled with personages of rank and fashion at the Wells.

Card-playing went on all day in the Long Room, and dancing pretty well all night. But, then, card-playing was the general amusement of all classes in that day. At Hampstead it became a passion, especially with women, ‘who, possessed by excitement and avarice, and in the hope of winning seven guineas for one by giving the enamelled ball a graceful twirl to induce it to fall upon four cards nominated for luck’s sake, out of two-and-thirty, staked and lost money, diamonds, beauty, and reputation at the fair diversion,’ as our essayist calls it, all which had been translated from the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury and Red Lion Square to the Wells and raffling-shops of Hampstead.

It is not until 1710 that I find in the _Postboy_ (April 18) the following advertisement:

‘As there are many weddings at Sion Chapel, Hampstead, five shillings only are required for all the church fees of any couple that are married there, provided they bring with them a license, or certificate, according to the Act of Parliament. Two sermons are continued to be preached in the said chapel every Sunday, and the place will be given to any clergyman that is willing to accept of it, if he is approved of.’

In _Read’s Weekly Journal_, September 8, 1716, we come upon this:

‘Sion Chapel at Hampstead, being a private and pleasure place, many persons of the best fashion have lately been married there. Now, as a minister is obliged to attend, “This is to give notice that all persons upon bringing a license, and who shall keep their wedding dinner in the gardens, only five shillings will be demanded of them for all fees.”’

Park adds that, from these advertisements, Sion Chapel would seem to have been the prototype of the Fleet and Mayfair marriages, but this is incorrect. Fleet marriages took place as early as 1704. The honour of primitive suggestion belongs rather to Gretna Green.[235]

Amongst other popular attractions of Hampstead, though hardly to the taste of the more refined visitors, was a pleasure fair. In the _Spectator_ for July 29, 1712 (No. 443, original edition), a notice appears that Hampstead Fair will be held upon the Flask Walk on Friday, August 1, and will hold four days. As fairs were annual occurrences, we must conclude that for four days yearly the rural quiet and beauty of Hampstead were delivered over to ‘rude mirth and tipsy revelry,’ much as it is in these days at the holidays of Easter and Whitsuntide.[236]

A triangular bit of waste ground, open in my time at the upper part of Flask Road, was pointed out to me by an archæological friend as the place where _anciently_ that earliest institution of social life, the village pound, and subsequently the stocks and cage, stood, as the after-site of the fair. The fair (continued for more than thirty years after this date)—a fair for the sale of gingerbread, toys, sweetmeats, chap-books, wares such as Autolycus the rogue sold, or affected to sell, the maids. But a pleasure-fair by no means precluded the presence of unpleasant company, and here, as at other fairs, to intoxication, rioting, and uproar, robberies were superadded.

The fair, not being a chartered one, but simply permissive by license of the Lord or Lady of the Manor, or the Middlesex magistrates, had frequently been written about and complained of; but the nuisance was suffered to go on till, at length (as late as 1746), it became so great a drawback to the comfort of the respectable inhabitants and visitors, that it was forbidden by the authorities at Hicks’s Hall, a prohibition that did not prevent an impudent attempt, two years subsequently, to revive it, on the part of one Thomas Keate, probably the landlord of the Lower Flask Tavern, who made his purgation in a London newspaper as follows:

‘THE FLASK, HAMPSTEAD,

‘_August 2, 1748_.

‘Whereas I published an advertisement on Saturday last, declaring a sale of goods and toys to be held at Hampstead, which advertisement was addressed to persons usually frequenting Hampstead Fair, and occasioned great numbers of loose and disorderly people to resort to Hampstead, under the notion that the Fair suppressed two years since as illegal, would be revived, and held in the Flask Walk ... I take this publick opportunity to declare that I am extremely sorry, that I should ignorantly be engaged to act in opposition to the Magistrates of the County, in any endeavour to revive a Fair deemed illegal by authority; and I hope this public acknowledgment of my error will satisfy their worships, and declaring that I will desist from any such attempt for the future.

‘THOMAS KEATE.’

This epistle, as far as I have discovered, is final with regard to the fair in Flask Walk, though sadly out of chronological order here. Happily for the lovers of historic Hampstead, the site of the ancient Pump-house in Well Walk has been discovered, while that of the modern one is preserved by an inscription on a part of the house now occupying its place. But the situation of Sion Chapel, of which we completely lose count after the early advertisements I have transcribed, is not known.

Unfortunately, the easy access to the Wells from London—a walk of only four or five miles being but an ordinary recreation to persons unaccustomed, as a rule, to any other mode of locomotion—made it impossible to maintain the exclusiveness dear to the dignity of the Ladies Betty, Moll, or Susan, who stepped so stately,

‘Alack! the little heels won’t let them haste!’

under the _then_ young limes shading the Well Walk. This ease of access bounced into their midst the City madams and pert, Fleet Street seamstresses, that furnished the fun of Baker’s comedy, a force stronger in the end than the _Bon ton_, who, after a decade of endurance, forsook the _Fons Sanitatis_ of Hampstead, and its high-priest, Dr. Gibbons.

But intermediately the proprietor of the Wells had been doing a thriving business in illicit marriages and frequent wedding-dinners; and Hampstead had won for itself a quite unenviable notoriety. Play often ran so high at the gaming-tables that the Justices at the Quarter Sessions at Hicks’s Hall recommended the great room at Hampstead to the particular attention of the petty constables and head-boroughs of the parish, to prevent all unlawful gaming, riots, etc. As for the rest, Baker’s comedy, to which I have alluded (and which is still extant) offers a very graphic description. Park has quoted at considerable length from it, but Park is not often read out of the reading-room of the British Museum, or the Public Library at Hampstead.

Smart, in the said comedy, discussing philosophically the social peculiarities of the Long Room, observes that assemblies so near town give us examples of all degrees. ‘We have Court ladies, all air and no dress; City belles, overdressed and no air; and country dames with broad brown faces like a Stepney bun; besides an endless number of Fleet Street seamstresses, that dance minuets in their furbeloe scarfs, and whose clothes hang as loose on them as their reputations.’

Arabella (another character in the same play) observes: ‘Well, this Hampstead is a charming place; to dance all night at the Wells, and be treated at Mother Huffs’;[237] to have presents made one at the raffling-shops,’ etc. Occasional visitors to the Wells on assembly nights might reasonably desire to dance the day-dawn in for safety’s sake; and the extension of the hours at the Long Room might possibly have originated in the perils of getting home from it. The roads, hazardous even by day, were doubly so after dark, especially in the neighbourhood of towns. The Hampstead coach had quite recently been stopped and robbed (1713), although a portion of the Hampstead road was just then unpleasantly occupied by the body of a murderer hanging in chains,[238] an object-lesson our forefathers were fond of exhibiting with deterrent intention, and with about as much practical result as from the suspension of criminal crows in a harvest-field.

But to return to the Wells. Let us be thankful for the old newspapers and magazines, that in feeble type and quaintly-worded paragraphs and advertisements have yet preserved for us faithful transcripts of the ways and fashions of the times, so that with a file of old _Postboys_, _Mists_, and _Read’s Weekly Journal_, and the _Lady’s Magazine_, but little imagination is required to revivify the company in Well Walk (that focus of fashion whilst fashion clung to it), to reclothe them in the costumes they wore, and busy them again in all their old occupations and amusements.

We can see in fancy the large, cumbrous, top-heavy coach toiling up the steep hill, tacking like a ship against a head-wind, until it landed its passengers at the coach office, the Bird-in-Hand,[239] or, higher up, at the Upper Flask. Say that it is the afternoon of a summer’s day in 1713-14. Amongst a crowd of other passengers, a lady in a little flutter of expectation, her head-dress a lace or muslin hood, with turnover (a species of fichu) ... and ruffles to match, steps out on the points of her high-heeled shoes, letting her hoop expand with a grace totally unknown to the modern wearers of crinoline.[240]

Be sure she has in her netted or embroidered hand-bag a little of the famous ‘Bavarian red liquor,’ which gave such a ‘delightful blushing colour to the cheeks pale or white,’ and which is not ‘to be discovered as other than the natural colour by the most fine sight.’ Nor is she without a bottle of Hungary, or citron water, for being a fine lady she must have nerves.

To-morrow what a stir she will create on the Well Walk in her voluminous brocade or Italian silk gown, shining with gold or silver flowers, and cut in the latest fashion!

There is no dearth of matters to be discussed by the general company. The Lottery and the South Sea Scheme are flourishing, and afford interesting topics for all grades of society; then there is the opera and the theatres, and the last duel, and, apart from the ladies, the recent doings at Hendon and Hockley-in-the-Hole.

Should Arbuthnot, or Swift, or Steele, happen to be amongst the crowd of visitors, Pope, who has already made a name in literature, and, like his friend Mr. Murray, been early admitted to the fellowship of the wits at Button’s and the Scriblerus Club, is not likely to find their criticisms on his recently-published verses wholly favourable, though regarded as giving great promise, which the ‘little fellow,’ as Johnson subsequently called him, is bound to make good.

Quite in opposition to Dr. Gibbons’ advice, the ladies, one and all, file into the tea-room, where the best Bohea at eighteen shillings a pound is dispensed in diminutive Nankin china cups without handles, to hold and drink out of which gracefully is in itself a fine art. Pope describes

‘How her red lips affected zephyrs blow To cool Bohea, and inflame the beau; While one white finger and a thumb conspire To lift the cup, and make the world admire.’

Or they stroll off to ransack the raffling-shops for gloves, fans, etc., while the gentlemen smoke, play at bowls, or adjourn to cards. In the Long Room the musicians play, and those who like may dance, or rehearse their steps and figures for the evening exhibition of them. Some wander away to the green skirts of Caen Wood, or seek the deep-hedged lanes, where the elm boughs meet overhead. While others are content to find their pleasure on the Heath, with its ever-varied, ever-lovely views, or choose the pleasant shade of its leafy groves, that both diversify the scene and break the force of the winds that blow upon it. Others, again, ride or drive to some of the many pretty places, or the seats of friends in the vicinity, Highgate, and Hornsey, and Colney Hatch being in much favour with the gentry as sites for country-houses. Then at the orthodox hour for the promenade, what a flutter of fans, and tapping of fine snuff-boxes, and lifting of laced or feathered hats, as the company bow, and curtsey, and smile, and ogle, as they pass and repass in the walks, the ladies resplendent in ‘stained silks,’ damasks, and flowered satins, that from the perfection of their texture would, in the parlance of old folks describing them, have literally stood alone. Nor was the dress of the gentlemen less superb. Their quaintly-cut, wide-skirted coats, with great cuffs bound with gold or silver lace, and deep flapped waistcoats richly embroidered, were often of the most costly materials, accompanied with flowing cravats—or falls, as they were called—and hanging ruffles of Mechlin or other lace. Then there were the shoes—the beaux wore them—with red heels and silver or brilliant buckles; and, again, the sword-hilt, band, and knot, allowed of a variety of dainty devices, the sword-hilt being sometimes of plain steel or silver only, but sometimes gilt and jewelled.

No record remains to us of the great ladies who gave the encouragement of their presence to the fashion of the Hampstead Wells in those early years; but we know that Addison, and Garth, and Steele, and Arbuthnot, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Swift, and all the Kit-Cats, were of the company. And their presence there has made the Heath and Well Walk classic ground for all who love the eighteenth century. It was a time of lordly bows, deep curtseys, stately manners, and coarse speech, and the day of depraved morality and affected sentiment. Women in want of an expletive had hardly given up the use of oaths; Her Grace of Marlborough habitually retained them; and men felt but little restriction in the presence of women. Indecent equivoke and _double entendre_ were thought witty even in good society, and judging from Swift’s correspondence with Lady Betty Germain and Miss Arbuthnot, there was a freedom of speech between the sexes that astonishes one. Modesty must have been relegated to the fan, for evidently it was not on guard in the ear any longer.

Away from the temptations, engagements, and frivolities of town life, as housewives and mothers (to give them their due), these ladies took an active part in domestic affairs, and taught their children, harshly enough sometimes, the lesson of dutifulness and obedience—a lesson too much neglected in modern education. But for a woman to exhibit a love of learning or a predilection for its pursuit was to incur the suspicion and contempt of her own sex, and the derision of the other. Ordinarily women read, in the language of the day, ‘to kill time,’ and this amusement was chiefly supplied to them by the playwrights or the novels of Fielding or Mrs. Aphra Behn, works of fiction that taught their readers a new use for the squabs of the settee or sofa whenever a visitor was announced.

The mission of the essayists who produced the _Spectator_ and _Guardian_ was to purify the manners of the times, to awaken an interest in literature for its own sake, and to show through the amusing medium of narrative and anecdote the meanness and wickedness of much that was going on unconcealed, and yet unnoticed, around them.

It is said that the publication of these works exercised a perceptible influence on society, and produced a permanent improvement in morals, no mean mission, nor contemptible result, if they ever effected it.

Few country ladies, unless privileged persons who desired to keep up their relations with the Court, came to London in those days, except on urgent occasion. The great trouble and expense the journey involved, the execrable condition of the roads, and terror of the highwaymen who infested them, were reasons quite sufficient to account for the home-staying, which has often been put to their account as a virtue, and flaunted in the face of their travel-loving great-great-great-grand-daughters. The principal event in the lives of many country ladies was the summer visit to one of the fashionable spas—Bath or Harrogate, Tunbridge or Hampstead Wells—where they met old friends and renewed acquaintances, picked up the threads of unfinished family histories, saw dress ‘as worn in the politest circles,’ compared notes with one another, and acquired the newest information of the world that lay outside their own, so that on their home-going they became exemplars and oracles on all social and society matters to those of their acquaintance who had not had the felicity of visiting the spa.

But to return to Hampstead. The light-hearted indifference to what was going on around them enabled the fashionable visitors to endure the scandal of the runaway marriages at Sion Chapel, the hurly-burly of the four days’ fair, and the company brought together by these doings; but at last the cheating play at the raffling-shops, and the morals of Hampstead, became so notorious ‘that persons of character were almost ashamed to be seen there, even with their own relations,’ and the most reckless of the rank and file of fashion found it necessary to turn their backs upon it. Yet, before it reached this last depth of moral degradation, Hampstead Wells must have exhibited a brilliant epitome of Bath and Tunbridge. Of course, the behaviour of the company at the Assembly and Long Room was not lost sight of by the wits and satirists of the day. The ballad-singers preserved the follies of the Wells in wicked verse; the playwrights—at least one of them, as we have seen—dramatized them; and I should not wonder if Baker’s holding of the ‘mirror up to Nature,’ or the modish pretence of Nature that so often passes for it, had something to do with the waking up of thoughtful people, and the falling-off of fashion from the place.

A few people of the upper class, who had learned to love sweet Hampstead for its own sake, continued, from season to season, to return here for change of air, so that the better kind of lodging-houses in Pond Street and elsewhere were not wholly deserted. Neither were the Wells, of which we have a rather deterrent proof in the following advertisement from the _Daily Courant_ of June 18, 1718:

‘HAMPSTEAD.—Whereas it has been reported that a robbery has been committed this season upon the road to Hampstead Mineral Well, this is to inform ladies and gentlemen that for the future at half-past ten in the evening, every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday (being public days), there will be a sufficient guard, _well armed_, sent by the inhabitants of the said Wells, to attend the company thence to London.’[241]

Evidently the citizens and their wives, and others of the inhabitants of London, did not forsake the allurements of the Long Room and the Walks. Neither did the City seamstresses in their vamped-up fine clothes, nor the City fop,

‘Who put on belt and sword at Temple Bar.’

The early termination to the evening’s entertainment, in contrast with the all-night dancing Arabella had enjoyed at the Wells, is noticeable in the above advertisement, but is by no means attributable to the improved morals of the place. It appears to have sunk year by year.

The cheating at the gambling-tables led to fighting and riots. Footpads lurked in the fields and hedges, and highwaymen infested the roads, making them more than ordinarily perilous for foot-passengers, and adding greatly to the duties of the magistrates at Hicks’s Hall (the annals of which would, I imagine, throw considerable light upon the story of the Hampstead Wells at this intermediate period).

Ten years after the decline of their fashion, many of the buildings in the Well Walk disappeared, but the tavern, then known as the Whitestone Inn,[242] the Assembly-room and pump-room (under the same roof), and the Long Room, with the tea and coffee rooms adjoining it, remained. Dr. Gibbons still lived, and still retained his faith, as did Dr. Arbuthnot also, in the valuable curative quality of the water, and the invigorating air of Hampstead, which, when occasion required, he not only recommended to his friends, but sought himself. In this way it is that we find Gay here in the summer of 1722, whose friends had ‘brought him,’ as he says, ‘to Hampstead at a time when his life was despaired of,’ after the failure of the South Sea Scheme, in which his slender fortune was invested. Here, in Well Walk, we can imagine him seated, with Pope and Arbuthnot by him, owing his recovery almost as much to the tenderness of the author as to the skill of the doctor.

It was during Gay’s stay at Hampstead that he wrote his tragedy of ‘The Captive,’ which he was requested to read to the Princess of Wales at Leicester House. On that occasion, when the hour came, and he saw the Princess and her ladies in expectation, advancing ‘with reverence too great for any other attention, and pre-resolved to impress Her Royal Highness as favourably towards the poet as the poem, he quite lost sight of a footstool in the way, and, stumbling over it, fell against a large screen, which he overset, and thus made his obeisance in a style that threw the ladies into no small disorder, and himself into such a state that but for the good-nature of his royal auditor must have told severely against the effect of the tragedy,’[243] which was brought out at Drury Lane, and played on the third night by particular desire of the Princess of Wales.[244] Think of the good-natured merriment with which Arbuthnot, ‘who was seldom serious but when attacking some great enormity,’ received the account of his fat friend’s sudden projection into the royal circle; how Swift must have chuckled over the comicality, Pope and the rest of the witty brotherhood joining in a loud laugh that none would enjoy more heartily than the genial-tempered subject of it.

In 1723 I find Mrs. Pendarves writing to Swift that ‘the beautiful Irish girl, Miss Kelly’ (the _Syren_ of this lady’s letters to her sister) ‘is at Hampstead, quite alone, and she deserves it. She is in a very expensive way, with her sickness, her servants, and her horses, high passions, low spirits, and a tyrannous father.’

Not a very pleasing picture of the wilful Irish beauty who paid Hampstead the compliment to prefer it to more fashionable places. Yet the fair widow had previously written of Miss Kelly as ‘very harmless, and not at all _coquet_; she brings in all the news that flies about, and now and then adds a little of her own.’

This is the lady about whom Lady Betty Germain eight years later writes to Swift, observing:

‘Miss Kelly was a very pretty girl when she went from hence, and the beaux show their good taste by liking her. I hear her father is now kind to her, but if she is not mightily altered, she would give up some of her airs and equipage to live in England.’

In a letter of a later date, to the Dean, Lady Betty says:

‘Surely your Irish air is very bad for darts, if Miss Kelly’s are blunted already. Make her cross father let her come here, and we won’t use her so in England.’

Once more, May 1, 1733, Lady Betty, still writing to Swift, says:

‘I am extremely Miss Kelly’s humble servant, but I will never believe she is more valued for her beauty and good qualities in Ireland than she was in England.’

Then comes a bit of ill news concerning the Hibernian beauty:

‘I am heartily sorry for your new friend, Mrs. Kelly, who writes in a desponding way to Mrs. Chambers (Lady Betty Germain’s niece) about her health, and talks of going to Spa. This is a melancholy subject, and I hate to be vexed, so I will say no more of it.’

But she does say some more about it in a letter to the Dean from Knowle (or, as she spells it, Knole), July 9, 1733:

‘I hear poor Mrs. Kelly is not near so well as she says; and a gentleman that came from Bristol says she looks dreadfully, and fears that it is all over with her, and that no mortal could know her. So ends youth and beauty!’

And so exit the beautiful Miss Kelly, of whom I find no further traces at Hampstead or elsewhere. Her story, I think, may easily be traced in these few epistolary extracts: ‘That she belonged to the beau monde is evident, or she would not have been received into that “old courtiers’” set,’ as Mrs. Pendarves calls Lady Betty, whose name visitors to Knowle will be familiar with.[245]