CHAPTER XVI.

_THE WELL WALK—THE SECOND PERIOD._

Although it could not be said that the Wells were ever actually closed till subsequent to 1809, the visits of the head-borough and a _posse_ of constables at unexpected hours had so disarranged the system of play in Well Walk that before 1725 the gaming-tables, and with them the raffling-shops, had disappeared.

Defoe, in an early edition of his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us, in describing the Hampstead Wells, that _besides the Long Room_, where the gentry meet to amuse themselves and play at cards publicly, on Monday evenings, there is an Assembly-room for dancing 60 feet long and 30 feet wide, elegantly decorated. Every gentleman who subscribes a guinea has a ticket for himself and two ladies; to non-subscribers the fee for admission is two and sixpence. Another authority adds that most of the resident gentlemen are subscribers.[246]

In these days of incandescent gas and electric light, one shudders at the thought of this handsome sixty-feet-long assembly-room illuminated by chandeliers filled with pyramids of candles, with others in plated or pewter sconces at set distances on the walls.

At Almack’s, long afterwards, where only the best wax-lights were tolerated, complaints of the destruction to the ladies’ dresses, and gentlemen’s also, from the dropping of the melted wax upon them, were frequent. I have no doubt the same lamentation was heard at Hampstead, where the method of lighting could scarcely have been as perfect. But if the illumination inside be thought inadequate, what is to be said as to the state of things outside? It was a happy circumstance when a full moon fell due upon an assembly night, and was accordingly set forth in the advertisement. Otherwise a row of lanterns, suspended from tree to tree above the Well Walk, lighted the visitors to the rooms, though these, towards the end of the century, were superseded by ill-smelling and uncertain oil-lamps.

Under these circumstances, leaving the rooms was perilous. Groups of flambeaux in the hands of waiting serving-men and link-boys threw a lurid glow through the foul-smelling smoke that clouded them, and under cover of which cut-purses and pickpockets, amongst them, perhaps, the notorious Jenny Diver herself,[247] were enabled to mix with the company leaving the doors, and relieve them of laced handkerchiefs, fans, purses, snuff-boxes, and jewellery, without detection. Not unfrequently the throng was swelled by a mob of roughs (as we now call them), who, getting up a quarrel for the express purpose of creating confusion, could so cover the retreat of the thieves.

This state of things was often recurring in Well Walk, and continued down to quite the end of the eighteenth century. Cradock, quoted by Lord Campbell in his ‘Lives of the Lord Chancellors,’ tells his readers that one evening the Misses Thurlow (there were three of them),[248] being at the Hampstead Assembly, were on returning in some danger from a riot at the door, from which they were rescued by a young officer who happened to be present, and who handed them in safety to their coach. The incident reads like the opening of a Della Cruscan romance; but, alas! the Lord High Chancellor Thurlow had outlived romance, though he made a point of calling the next morning on the young gentleman, whom he found at breakfast, and satisfied his sense of obligation to him by offering to partake of it, which he did.

How or when the notorious Sion Chapel was disposed of we learn nothing.[249] Park is silent on the subject. I think it not impossible that on the falling off of visitors to the Wells, and the probable discontinuance of marriages at the chapel, the latter being private property, the owner may have turned it wholly to secular uses, and have converted it into the fine Assembly Room, with the hope of adding a new attraction to the place for the general public.

If so, he appears to have wholly failed in his speculation, for, owing to the questionable company who found admittance to it, the resident gentry withdrew their patronage, and held their assemblies in the long room of the Upper Flask. This movement must have destroyed at one stroke the prestige and prosperity of the beautiful Assembly Room, the assured support of which rested with the resident subscribers.

But if Park ignores the fate of the degraded Sion Chapel, he is almost as reticent with regard to the New Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk. He makes a mistake of eight years in the date of its opening. The bell, and the altar plate, the first given by Mr. Rous and Mr. Wood (a name long known in connection with Hampstead), the latter by the old physician, Dr. Gibbons, were severally inscribed, ‘New Chapel, Hampstead, 1725,’ and ‘Nova Capella de Hampstead, 1725.’ Park did not know of this till the editor or a contributor to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ challenged the correctness of the date he had given (1733) for the opening of the new chapel.

In 1725 Dr. Gibbons died, leaving, as a testimony of his concern for them, £100 to the poor of Hampstead. Six years later I find in the obituary of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, under the date of September 26, 1731, ‘At Hampstead, Mr. Rous, who built a chapel there.’ Park states that the New Chapel in Well Walk was _universally_ understood to have been the Assembly room of the Wells Tavern,’ but he admits that Mr. Rous having built a chapel, and the expressions ‘Nova Capella’ on the altar plate, and ‘New Chapel’ on the bell, seem rather to contradict the traditionary account that it was originally a ballroom; but he observes with the tenacity of an unconvinced man, ‘I have met with no positive evidence on this subject.’

During the lapsed quarter of a century between the opening of the Wells and the opening of the New Chapel in Well Walk, great additions and alterations had taken place in the village. The beauty of the situation and the well-known healthiness of the air induced many of the wealthy merchants of London to purchase or build mansions on and about the Heath, and their example was followed by some of the well-to-do people of a lower grade, who began to run up (every man being his own architect) edifices that in their fantastic reality vied with the imaginary structure of Joseph Wilks, of Thames Street, Esq., who, in the event of his ticket in the lottery winning, resolved to fit up a snug little box at Hampstead in the Chinese taste for his retirement on Sundays.[250]

I find from a guide-book of 1724 that at that time Hampstead had risen from a little country village almost to a city. In October, 1734, Dr. Arbuthnot, who was ill at Hampstead, says when writing to Swift: ‘I am going out of this troublesome world, and you, amongst the rest of my friends, shall have my last prayers and good wishes.’ He had gone there so reduced by a dropsy and asthma that he could ‘neither sleep, breathe, eat, or move,’ and, contrary to his expectation, had recovered his strength to a considerable degree, and was able to ride, sleep, and eat with appetite. He tells his friend that he expects upon his return to London and the coming of winter that the symptoms of his disease will return with them, for that ‘no man at his age could hope to recover.’

His experiment had been, not with a view to life, but _ease_. ‘I am at present,’ he says, ‘in the case of a man that was almost in harbour, and then blown back to sea; who has a reasonable hope of going to a good place, and an absolute certainty of leaving a very bad one;’ and then he corrects himself, having experienced many comforts in this world in the affections of his family and the kindness of friends, and gives a touching peep at his domestic relations in three or four lines:

‘My family give you their love and service. The great loss I sustained in one of them gave me my first shock, and the trouble I have with the rest to bring them to a good temper to bear the loss of a father who loves them, and whom they love, is really a most sensible affliction to me.’[251]

Shortly after the date of this letter, Pope, writing to one of the Miss Blounts, tells her that he had seen Dr. Arbuthnot, who was very cheerful:

‘I spent a whole day with him at Hampstead. He was in the Long Room half the morning, and has parties at cards every night. Mrs. Lepell and Mrs. Saggione and her sons and two daughters are all with him.’

In the March following Dr. Arbuthnot died, as he believed he should on his return to London.

‘Poor Arbuthnot, who grieved to see the wickedness of mankind, and was particularly esteemed by his own countrymen,[252] is dead, to the great regret of everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him intimately.’

Of him Swift wrote to Pope, referring to his humanity and benevolence, ‘Oh that the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it! I would burn my travels’ (‘Gulliver’); and when a lady asked the satirical Dean for the Doctor’s character, he summed it up in a sentence, ‘He has more wit than we all have, and his humanity is equal to his wit.’

The presence of such an invalid at the Wells is a proof that faith in the potency of the regimen observed there, and in the health-giving air of the Heath, was by no means withdrawn from them. Indeed, we read that at this date and during the previous season, more company had been seen in the walks than had visited the village for years—a fact not lost upon Dr. Soames, the friend of, and possibly the successor to, Dr. Gibbons, whose treatise afforded him the literary material and groundwork for his pamphlet on the ‘Hampstead Mineral Wells, with Directions how to Drink the Waters’—an essay calculated to impress his patients, and even the general public, with the sanitary combinations of the rural resort. It was published in 1734, and is not without interest. He repeats the description of the older writer and physician, that Hampstead ‘is situated somewhat romantic, but every way pleasant, on several little hills, on high ground of different soils.’

‘That here persons may draw in a pure and balmy air, with the heavens clear and serene, at that season of the year that the great and populous City of London is covered with fogs and smoke. And what adds,’ observes the doctor, ‘to the blessings of the place is the salubrious water of Hampstead, which may be justly called the Fountain of Health.’

He describes the chalybeate as breaking out from the declivity of the hill, to the east of the town, near the chapel and bowling-green, and tells us that it was conveyed through a pipe to a marble perforated bowl or reservoir adjoining the chapel. Dr. Soames, as his predecessor had done, notices the views from the Heath, its soils, and the number of aromatic plants growing on it, and adds that the Apothecaries’ Company seldom miss coming to Hampstead every spring to have their botanizing feast.[253] ‘As for walks and shady groves,’ he continues, ‘we have our share, and those are very delightful.’ But his praises of the spring which trickled till within the last few years into its basin on the left-hand side of the walk on entering it from the Heath, and his regimen for the water-drinkers, are the most amusing part of his treatise. He assures his readers that ‘the chalybeate, though as strong, if not stronger, than that of Tunbridge Wells of the iron mineral, is not at all unpleasant; that if well corked and sealed down, and kept in a cellar for one or two years, when you have drawn the cork it will be most ready to fly, and when poured into a glass, will sparkle and knit up like a glass of champagne or Herefordshire cider.’

He recommends the drinking of this water in cases of defective digestion, in preference to the drinking of drams (a thing too common in his day), which he hopes ‘may not spread its contagion beyond his own sex.’ At the same time he greatly hopes that the inordinate drinking of _thea_ may be retrenched, which, if continued in, will infallibly ‘cause the next generation to be more like pigmies than men and women.’[254] The best time to take the waters is from June to Michaelmas; the time of day an hour after sunrise (no wonder music began in the Long Room at 6 a.m.). He allows his patients balm, or sage tea, with a little orange-peel in it for breakfast; or chocolate, milk, porridge, or mutton-broth, with bread-and-butter. An hour after taking the water, coffee may be used—the less the better—but as for the green or bohea _thea_, that ‘ought to be banished.’

Smoking appears to have been allowed, for Dr. Soames observes that those who take tobacco ‘may do so with all safety’; only he politely suggests, ‘let them not offend the company, especially the ladies, who cannot well relish that smoke with their waters.’ He recommends his patients a ride of four or five miles one hour after drinking them, or, where there is an objection to riding, to divert themselves with the amusements of the place. These, as we have said, had considerably contracted since the days when the members of the Kit-Cat Club had mingled with the visitors in the walks, and exchanged smart repartees together, as was the fashion of the day, when the last bon-mot at Button’s was set against the newest scandal at the Wells.

Dr. Soames’ regimen, it will be seen, consisted in early hours, temperance, pure air, invigorating exercise, and whatever tended to maintain a cheerful temper; these made the curative charm of the Hampstead waters, and for a time restored the reputation of the Wells.

It is rather amusing to find the curate in league with the doctor, and setting himself forth as an example of the efficacy of the waters. ‘Could my pen convey to others the idea I have of them,’ exclaims this enthusiastic partisan, ‘and the advantages we should have in using them, we should see the walks crowded as heretofore, twenty or thirty years ago. And it is some pleasure,’ he adds complacently, ‘to be informed that this summer they have not been without a pretty number of visitors.’

If we add the amount of satisfaction felt by Mr. Watts, Curate and Lecturer of Hampstead, to that of the inhabitants whose tenements were at the disposal of the said visitors, we get the idea that Hampstead must have smiled all over this season with a satisfaction it had not known in many preceding ones. All the little green-fenced white cottages in the neighbourhood of South End and the Vale of Health (reminiscent in its very name of the Gibbons and Soames period), as well as those on the upper slope of the East Heath and Squire’s Mount (to which a then leafy lane ran up from the Wells), had had a fresh coat of spotless paint put on. The mistresses of them were nodding and smiling to one another at their doors, and asking if they were ‘all let,’ or ‘quite full,’ or some question or other, indicative of a personal and neighbourly interest, which left it without doubt that they themselves had not another room to spare; while the select houses in Pond Street, and Lower Flask Walk, with their better accommodation and superior landladies, received such an access of purification and polish, that the flashing of the fanlights over the hall doors, and the shining of brass knobs and knockers, and the superlatively white, neatly-festooned blinds to every window, were in themselves so many letters of recommendation writ large.

Lodgings were to be had in the High Street, where little else was to be had, the few shops in it, with their half-hatch doors, open shop-boards, and hanging shutters, showing only the most simple necessaries of village life—always excepting the so-called general shop, with its heterogeneous stock of dry-goods, drapery, and drugs. Every household in those days baked its own bread, and an itinerant butcher visited the village weekly.[255] But the farms and cottages around supplied the freshest butter, eggs, milk, cream and poultry, with the common kinds of vegetables and fruit; for the rest, there was the London carrier, who led his horse by easy stages up the hill, bringing provisions, as requisitioned from day to day, for the visitors.

At the opening of the season, the farmhouse productions rose to famine price; the laundresses who lived in a congeries of cottages, at the bottom of the Vale of Health, with their backs to the east wind and the pool—for the pond as we see it now was not made till 1777, previous to which date it was a mere pool fed by a spring that trickled from the bank that margined it—immediately raised their prices. The parson bethought him of charity sermons, and the doctors of increased fees; and thus the whole social system of the village found itself comforted, and enriched, by a restored faith in the medicinal springs. In fact, to again quote Baker, ‘everything became as dear as a freeholder’s vote, and as great an imposition as a Dutch reckoning.’

But the Hampstead of these later days was an altered place from what it had been when Baker’s comedy was written. It had been made to see the error of its ways, and as the greatest sinners are said to become the greatest saints, so the peccant village appears to have recoiled to the opposite degree from its former self, even to the verge of decorous (some said dismal) dulness, and had fallen into neglect, as Dr. Soames very oddly phrases it, ‘through the knavery of some, the folly of others, and the exceeding great zeal for the glory of God and the good of the poor.’

The raffling-shops shut up, Mother Huff’s no longer heard of, the tea-gardens deserted for the most part by all but the common people, ‘who on Sundays, always mindful of the commandment which enjoins them to do no work on that day, took occasion to eat buns at Chelsea, drink beer at St. Pancras, of being sworn on the Horns at Highgate,[256] and of drinking tea at Hampstead or _Little_ Hornsey,’[257] which was in the centre of the present Finsbury Park.

New Georgia was as yet unheard of, but, if I remember aright, the bowling-green had not disappeared. The tavern is doing a brisk business; the Long Room is full of fine company, and the walks between the elms and limes in blossom, bright with colour, and gay with mirth, which, more robust than in these artificial times, laughed out merrily and was not ashamed.

Cards, I am obliged to say, were as much in request as ever, but the cheats at them were not professionals; and though Dr. Soames distinctly set his face against the ‘violent exercise of country dances,’ the fortnightly meetings in the Long Room were not thinned thereby. Concerts were of frequent occurrence, and the following ditty,[258] originally printed on a broad-sheet, and which afterwards appeared in the _Musical Entertainer_, and was set to music by Mr. Abel Whichello, under the title of ‘The beauties of Hampstead,’ was, in all probability, first sung at the Wells:

‘Summer heat the town invades, All repair to cooling shades; How inviting, how delighting, Are the flowery hills and vales!

‘Here, where lovely Hampstead stands, And the neighbouring vale commands, What surprising prospects rising, All around adorn the lands.

‘Here ever-woody mounts arise, There verdant lawns delight the eyes, Where Thames wanders—in meanders— Lofty domes approach the skies.

‘Here are grottos, purling streams, Shades defying Titan’s beams; Rosy bowers, fragrant flowers, Lovers’ wishes, poets’ themes.

‘Of the crystal, bubbling well, Life and strength the currents swell; Health and pleasure, heavenly treasure. Smiling, here united dwell.

‘Here, nymphs and swains, indulge your hearts, Share the joys the scene imparts; Here be strangers to all dangers All but those of Cupid’s darts!’

It is not impossible that a local speculator may have bribed the muse of one or other of the ever-ready Grub Street poets to compose these verses, which read very like a lyrical advertisement of the place; while the broad-sheet form in which they first appeared was the usual one in which such poetical puffs were presented.

Nothing can be more Arcadian than the conceits and images in this effusion; no one reading it at this time of day would imagine danger lurking in the shape of footpads in St. Pancras Vale, where Smollett makes one of his heroes walk with a drawn sword by the side of his mistress’s coach on her way to town from the Flask Walk. It was better to fall into the hands of the redoubted Turpin himself than into those of these cruel and rapacious robbers.[259] He, on the other hand, affected a certain bonhomie in his proceedings, and loved best to disembarrass his victims of their property without unnecessary violence. His wit appears to have been heavier than his hand.

‘You will soon be caught!’ cried out an angry but non-combative gentleman, one of two in a chaise, whom, besides others, he had robbed on a certain Sunday on the road between Hampstead and Highgate.

‘So I have thought myself,’ returned Dick, ‘but believe I am in no danger from you!’

During the years that had passed between the first opening of the Wells and this temporary resuscitation of their popularity, death had broken up that knot of brilliant wits and writers whose presence there has made Hampstead classical. Addison and Steele, Arbuthnot and Gay, were, in one sense, simply names, but names so intimately interwrought with the literature of their age and country as to be for ever inseparable from it.

‘Those sovereigns of the Muse’s skill Are the true patterns of good writing still!’

Swift, parted by the Irish Sea from his old associates, still lived, Dean of St. Patrick’s; and only Pope, pale and sickly, represents the bright band of literary brothers who had found many suggestive themes, in the Well Walk and its vicinity, for the exercise of their genial humour or piquant censorship. Jarvis, the friend of the poet, writing about this period to Dean Swift, observes: ‘Pope is off and on, here and there, everywhere, _à son ordinaire_, therefore as well as we can hope for a carcase so crazy.’ Jarvis was the well-known ‘face-painter,’ contemporary with Sir Godfrey Kneller, and who had given lessons to Pope in portrait-painting.[260]

The latter continued to visit Hampstead for Murray’s sake, whose love for the charming place ‘amounted almost to a passion,’ and who sought it on every opportunity.

One of the persons most constantly seen in the Long Room and the walks, at this period, was the newly-made Poet Laureate (Colley Cibber), a man of vast intelligence, though a little too full of self-importance, and perhaps egotism. His ‘Birthday Odes’ were the delight of the wits and the amusement of the critics, who pounced down upon them in the _Grub Street Journal_, and other publications, and literally tore them line from line. Colley was himself insensible to satire, though he could wield it very successfully against others. He always remained perfectly satisfied with his own performances as playwright, manager, and poet. So devoid was he of any sense of the absurdity of his odes, that he was in the habit of carrying them about with him, and reading them to those of his acquaintances who would listen, all the while unconscious that the little ill-dressed man, with the pain-drawn, sallow face and large, dark, luminous eyes, who was never without a knot of the best people in the company, _la crême des beaux esprits_, about him, was passing round an epigram of his own, the reading of which occasioned hilarious laughter.

The lines ran as follows:

‘In merry old England it once was a rule, The King had his poet, and also his fool; But now we’re so frugal, I’d have you to know it, That Cibber can serve both for fool and for poet.’

Let us take Swift against Pope:

‘Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool.’

No doubt Colley Cibber, who at seventy years of age aped the airs of a man of fashion, made himself as ridiculous on the walks at Hampstead as he subsequently did on the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, where Richardson describes him making love to the handsome Miss Chudleigh (the pseudo Duchess of Kingston[261]), and growing green with jealousy when she bestowed a smile on anyone but himself. His appointment to the Laureateship, and the Birthday and other odes in which he exhibited his poetical fitness for the honour of the wreath, occasioned Lady Betty Germain to remark, in one of her clever letters to Dean Swift, that if it was the Queen, and not the Duke of Grafton,[262] that picked out such a Laureate, she deserved his poetry in her praise.

In May we find Mrs. Donnellan,[263] sister to the Bishop of Killala, and a friend of Swift’s and Mrs. Delany’s,[264] writing to the latter that she is waiting in Dublin to cross to England ‘when the wind served.’ This lady, who appears to have frequently renewed her visits to Hampstead, was received in the best society, and especially sought that of distinguished literary people. She was the Philomela of the Widow Pendarves’ correspondence with her sister—an affectation that suggests that, like so many of her charming country-women, she had the gift of a melodious voice added to that exquisite Gaelic endowment of taste and feeling in the use of it. Richardson, who after the appearance of ‘Pamela’ had become famous, and was fêted and run after, especially by women who affected literature, was a friend of hers. She appears to have preferred Hampstead, not only for the sake of the Wells, but from her innate love for the natural beauty of the place.

In 1748, the year ‘Clarissa’ took the reading world by storm, Richardson succeeded in persuading her that the air of the north-west suburb was too sharp for her, and so lured her for a time to North End, Fulham. But though getting into years, the lady appears to have had a will of her own, and in the summer of this year returned to her favourite place of abode and the shelter of Pond Street.

Richardson, writing to Mrs. Delany, informs her of her friend’s removal, and adds: ‘I did myself the honour to dine with her there (Pond Street) yesterday. The weather was not propitious ... she complained.... I chid her for her removal. But upon my word, madam, I do think it is not so very much amiss sometimes that control ... but no more on this subject.... I will only add that she rejoices in her prospects variegated with hill and dale. They are certainly very fine.’ To this epistle, the style of which is very like that of his epistolary novels, Mrs. Delany, whose ‘deportment was all elegance, and speech all sweetness,’ as Burke expressed it, a born courtier at heart, replies that she has written to Mrs. Donnellan, ‘condemning her, though she was loath, for going to that _ugly Hampstead_, which she had never loved since Clarissa had such persecutions there.’

Nevertheless, Mrs. Donnellan continued to enjoy the air of Hampstead from time to time for ten years longer. Mrs. Barbauld, in her ‘Life of Richardson,’ tells us that a friend of hers at Hampstead could remember her ‘a venerable old lady with very sharp, black eyes.’

She was an intimate friend of the famous Mrs. Montague, the acknowledged patron of the literary and artistic celebrities of the time, the entrée to whose drawing-rooms bestowed a sort of diploma on the favoured recipient, which, by the way, was never extended to the literary bookseller. Mrs. Donnellan died of what Mrs. Montague calls ‘a cold and fever,’ the precursor, probably, of our modern influenza, as universal a plague in 1772 as the latter in 1893-94.

Though for a brief period after the publication of Dr. Soames’ treatise the presence of an increased number of visitors gladdened his heart, it soon became apparent that no persuasive pamphlet, no poetical puff, could restore it. The favour of people of fashion had passed away from it.

The walk without the raffling-shops and gaming-tables, and the ballroom without the freedom of the all-night dancing, had no charms for any others than the real lovers of the delightful suburb for its own sake. It came to be considered as a sort of natural sanatorium, a pleasant rustic summer resort and resting-place; and as the fame of the waters fell away, except in the grateful remembrance of those who had imagined themselves benefited by them, the reputation of its pure, health-giving air and the natural beauty of its situation and surroundings became more obvious to persons who, like Mrs. Donnellan, Mr. Murray, and others, were permeated with an ever-growing love of them.

It was no doubt the dearth of entertainment for the visitors that suggested to the inventive imagination of the sexagenarian Robert Causton the idea of opening the tea-drinking house, with pleasure-gardens, waterworks, and various ingenious contrivances (to which I have elsewhere referred) in a part of Turner’s Wood, the wood where the lilies-of-the-valley, once indigenous on Hampstead Heath, lingered latest.

It was opened in 1737, and became so popular with Londoners and the general public, that it remained open twenty years afterwards, so that the enterprise must have amply repaid the originator.

From this it would seem that not only Mother Huff’s, but others of these apparently innocent places for refreshment and recreation (so-called tea and bun houses), with their fair bowling-greens, and garden bowers, for summer evenings’, and Sunday afternoons’ rest and pleasure, were included in the general blight which the drastic measures of the magistrates at Hicks’s Hall had inflicted on Well Walk and its neighbourhood. We recognise the reason for this measure when we learn that many of their proprietors had succeeded, through a direct infringement of the law, in obtaining licenses for the sale of wine and punch, and in this way tea-houses had become sources of dissipation and vice.

In 1744, Pope, whose life had been one long illness, finally disappeared from the Well Walk, where with Murray and so many other wits and celebrities he had shared with the lighter crowd in the fashions and follies of the place—the last but one of that bright galaxy of literary stars in which it had been his privilege to shine and mingle. He died, to the regret of many admirers and the sincere sorrow of his friends. With all his faults—and they were flagrant—there must have been something lovable and sympathetic in his nature, to have won and kept the life-long friendship of men with minds and dispositions so differently constituted as Dr. Arbuthnot’s, Dean Swift’s, John Gay’s, and Mr. Murray’s.

His love for his mother and Gay was almost feminine in its steadfastness and tenderness, and I fancy we may discover something noble in his self-restraint when tending the latter from time to time during his illness at Hampstead, for, though suffering himself from the same circumstances, he never seems to have alluded to his own share of loss in the South Sea Bubble.

How affectionately each of the three ‘Yahoos’—Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Pope—alludes to the time they spent together at Twickenham, and how much of real pathos he, the most artificial of poets, crushed, as it were, into the two last lines of his intended epitaph on Gay!—

‘For all thy blameless life the sole return, My verse, and Queensberry’s tears above thy urn.’

Everyone knew of the misunderstanding between him and Addison from the commencement of his career; yet in expressing his regret for the essayist’s death, he observed there was in Addison’s conversation ‘more charm than he had heard in any other man’s.’ High praise from a supposed adversary, but praise that was assuredly due to him.

In the _Penny London Advertiser_, under the date of June 13-15, 1744, and the heading ‘Home News,’ it is stated that ‘Last week the body of Mr. Pope was privately interred at Twickenham, when twelve men and twelve women were entirely new cloathed, and attended his corpse to the grave, pursuant to his will.’[265] No reference is made to his genius, no word is said of his works; nor does it appear that any personal friends attended his funeral. I have said that, owing to his deformity and other causes, his life had been pronounced one long disease. I wonder if his more robustly-constituted critics took this fact into consideration when sitting in judgment on the bitterness, irritability, and other sins of omission and commission of the man of whom the friends around his death-bed observed ‘that his humanity survived his understanding,’ and whom Gay had said ‘he loved as his own soul.’ Think of fifty-six years’ habitation of a misshapen, dwarfed, feeble body, in which he could never have known freedom from physical depression, and say how many of us under the same conditions might not have dentated sharpest incisors rather than wisdom-teeth.

In 1748 Richardson, after eight years’ abstinence from novel-writing, produced his crowning work, ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a book that occasioned intenser excitement and more eager expectation than any work of fiction that had preceded it. To understand this, one has only to take a course of eighteenth-century belles-lettres, as exhibited in the romances of the magazines, and so-called memoirs, and narratives of the day.

In these no attempt is made to depict human nature naturally, or to endue the characters represented with the ordinary language, idiosyncrasies, temper, or feelings of living beings. Richardson’s style was formal and spiritless, and the epistolary form in which he developed his long-drawn stories absolutely wearisome; but he painted men and women, and made them speak. Their joys and sorrows, trials and temptations, were true to Nature, as were their weaknesses and vices; and this living force in his delineations—the human passion and the human pathos, that make many of his descriptions throb with life—touched the hearts of his readers, unaccustomed to such graphic treatment, with spontaneous sympathy, and set all England weeping over the imaginary wrongs and sorrows of _Miss Clarisse_, which Mr. Lang tells us the Young Pretender, with a reward of £30,000 for his apprehension hanging over his head, requested a lady of his acquaintance to secure for him. Not only matrons and maidens, but men also, persisted through the seven or eight volumes with unflagging interest, and any amount of lachrymatory effusion, amongst them a Bishop, who cheerfully averred that he had ‘shed buckets full of tears over its pages.’[266] No wonder if the author (whom Horace Walpole and others regarded as a ‘conceited prig’) did feel a little lifted up in self-estimation, especially when Johnson sententiously observed to him that in writing his story of ‘Clarissa Harlowe’ he ‘had enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.’

There is no doubt that Richardson’s writings initiated the English novel, which henceforth became the favourite form with writers of fiction. It will be remembered by those who have read ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a reprint of which, edited by Dallas, was brought out some years ago, that the heroine, in her innocence, takes shelter at the Upper Flask Tavern, and subsequently finds lodgings in Flask Road. Mrs. Barbauld tells us of her own knowledge of a Frenchman who paid a visit to Hampstead for the ‘sole purpose of finding the house in Flask Walk where Clarissa had lodged, and was surprised at the ignorance or indifference of the inhabitants on the subject,’ just as if Clarissa had been a living being.

Her story indelibly associates the author with Hampstead, where, indeed, the smooth-faced, precise, placid-looking little man might often be seen in retired corners of the pump-house or Long Room, or sidling behind the trees in the walks, or propped upon his stick, his favourite attitude, ‘one hand in his bosom, and the other supporting his chin.’ The year in which ‘Clarissa’ appeared was that in which Johnson, in spite of his poverty, had taken lodgings for the exacting Tetty in that ‘little house beyond the church,’ and was hard at work upon the ‘Vanity of Human Wishes,’ possibly to provide the means of paying for them. In this year—the ‘Clarissa’ year—the inhabitants of Hampstead being ‘very desirous to prevent any robberies or felonies being committed in the said parish,’ had joined with those of Hackney, Clapham, and probably other outlying suburbs, and subscribed amongst themselves to a common fund, which enabled them to offer a reward of ‘ten pounds to any person or persons who shall apprehend or take any highwayman or footpad, who shall commit any robbery within the said parish.’[267]

Similar announcements, differing in no way but in the name of the place, appeared almost simultaneously in the columns of the _Daily Advertiser_ in the month of June, 1748.

As early as 1736 the gentlemen of Hackney, then a beautiful subrural village, much affected by rich City men and merchants, had agreed to have ‘a good and substantial watch to patrol the footway between London and Hackney, from six at night till ten, all armed with halberts’; and years previously the turnpike men had provided themselves with long speaking-trumpets, that upon the first notice of a robbery they might alarm the distant villages, and enable the inhabitants to pursue the robbers. It was this state of social terror that roused the householders from time to time to band themselves together, and, armed with blunderbusses and cutlasses, to patrol the roads in the neighbourhood of their homes for mutual protection. Evidently a lawless time, with only one remedy, the gibbet, which an appearance before Sir John de Veil, or other Bow Street justice, was almost certain to be the prelude to.

The laws of England were draconic, the quality of mercy unknown. All gradations of crime were condemned together, and convicts came out by cart-fulls to Tyburn, where the cruel, stealthy, midnight murderer, and the pitiful thief who had filched a sixpence from a farmer’s boy,[268] came to the same end, and were hanged. ‘The death penalty,’ says Horace Walpole, ‘was as frequent as curses in the Commination Service.’

Through all these years no attempt had been made by those in authority to remedy the dangerous state of the roads. All round the Metropolis, even at noonday, no traveller was safe. Barnet, Hoxton, the Hendon Fields, Finchley Common, Tottenham Court Road, Pancras Meadows, the Half-way House (Mother Red-Cap), Kilburn, and the Highgate Road, were all haunts of footpads and highwaymen, of whom, in 1736, Dick Turpin, especially in Epping Forest, was the most active and successful. Hence the crude co-operation of the inhabitants of Hampstead and other villages to defend themselves.

A pamphlet written by Henry Fielding, the novelist, who had been himself a magistrate, lets us into the fact that the sympathies of the working classes were with the law-breakers, who, though publicly known for such, rode impudently through the streets[269] in the very sight of an officer who held in his pocket the warrant for their arrest, but dare not serve it for his life’s sake. It was verging towards the close of the eighteenth century before Sir Richard Ford established his plan of the horse patrol, or blind Sir John Fielding his system of Bow Street runners—his ‘black band,’ as they were called—and it was not till the fifteenth year of George III. (1774) that an Act was obtained for the lighting of the streets, roads, and public passages within the town of Hampstead, and for the establishment of a nightly patrol between the said town and London.

With light, and the horse patrol, the vocations of footpad and highwayman very soon showed signs of decline; but intermediately we read such paragraphs as the following: ‘On Saturday night between eight and nine o’clock four men were attacked in a field between Tottenham Court Road and the Half-way House to Hampstead by a single footpad, who came to them with a pistol in each hand, and robbed them of what money they had.’

A Mr. Herman was robbed of eight guineas and some silver on Finchley Common, on his return from Barnet, by two well-mounted highwaymen. A man was stopped close to the barn near the Mother Red-Cap by some villains, who robbed and murdered him, leaving him under the eaves of the barn, and two ladies were robbed on Hampstead Heath by a young man who informed them that he was ‘a baronet’s son, but in great distress.’

Very often we read of persons dying from wounds received in these brutal encounters, the scene of which, as in the instances above quoted, was often very near to Hampstead. ‘Mr. Bocket, an old inhabitant, remembered the mail-coach being robbed opposite Pilgrim Lane in 1800’—a fact for which I am indebted to Martin H. Wilkin, Esq.