CHAPTER VIII.

_HOLLY-BUSH AND WINDMILL HILLS._

Leaving Heath Street upon the right (at the end of High Street), and Mount Vernon on the left, the ascent of Holly-bush Hill, in the years I am writing of, led through into an open space with a bit of the waste running in upon it, with three tree-sheltered and old-fashioned red-brick houses on the very brow of Windmill Hill. One of these, the centre one of the three—Bolton House—was for many years the home of Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes, where Lady Davy often visited them to the very last.

Windmill Hill and Holly-bush Hill are in such close proximity that the names become almost convertible, and were not unfrequently used one for the other. Thus, the author of the ‘Northern Heights of London’ placed the home of Romney the painter on Windmill Hill, and suggested that it was the house standing in a garden at the back of Bolton House. But Park, who was resident at Hampstead, and published the first edition of his history in 1813, only eleven years after the death of Romney, distinctly states that ‘the present very elegant Assembly Room’ at the Holly-bush Tavern, with card and supper rooms adjoining, are ‘_partly_ formed out of the house built by Romney the painter.’

Other writers describe the Assembly Room as having made part of the artist’s gallery. When, for the purpose of this chapter, I personally visited the place to make inquiries on the spot, I was informed that, until recently, the Assembly Room and other public rooms adjoining it had been totally separate from the Holly-bush Tavern, making in point of fact part of another house, with which, except by going through the kitchen and garden of the inn, there was no communication. But all this had been altered, to the great convenience of persons attending the balls, concerts, lectures, etc.; and the lofty spacious rooms, further enlarged and decorated, were by these changes attached to, and entered from, the tavern.

More than forty years have passed since the above paragraphs were written, and all the functions, which then made the Holly-bush and the old Assembly Room of importance, are now removed to the Conservatoire, Haverstock Hill. I learn from Baines’ ‘Records of Hampstead,’ the Assembly Room, etc., is to this day held on a totally different agreement from the inn.

The life of Romney, as told by his biographers, is a melancholy one. In order to devote himself wholly to art and the acquisition of fame and fortune, he had sacrificed all domestic happiness, and condemned a young and loving wife to years of wasting and protracted solitude. When at last weary of the town and society, or, as his biographer puts it, ‘filled with that desire of the unsatisfied soul for a peace that the world cannot give,’ he had abandoned, after twenty years’ residence, his fine house in Cavendish Square, and had thrown away more than £2,000 on the building of a coveted retirement at Hampstead, a structure in which ‘the painting-room and gallery had been nobly planned, but all domestic conveniences overlooked.’ Here, with his friend and panegyrist, the poet Hayley—who, by the way, writes of his abode as his ‘singular house at Hampstead’—we find him projecting new subjects for his easel, and reproducing in characters as varied as her fortune the fascinating Lady Hamilton. Now she appears as Nature,[148] as the enchantress Circe, as a Magdalen with tear-stained eyes, a wood-nymph, the musically-inspired virgin St. Cecilia, or a vine-crowned Bacchante, as she smiles on us from the walls of the National Gallery.[149]

It was during Romney’s residence at Hampstead that Boydell resolved on publishing his ‘Shakespeare Gallery,’ and enlisted, among other artists, Romney’s talent for his enterprise.

‘Before you paint Shakespeare,’ observed Lord Thurlow, to whom the painter mentioned his commission, ‘I advise you to read him.’ A very pertinent suggestion, even if a little obvious.

In his fine painting-room during its first novelty Romney continued to receive visitors of high rank, and amongst other lovely personages the beautiful Mrs. Bosanquet and her children, as they stepped into the studio from their walk or drive, fresh as the Heath itself that they had crossed; the artist’s weary heart turning the while to his waiting wife, who through long years had endured, as Milton expresses it, ‘that greatest injury to the gentle spirit—the suffering of not being beloved, and yet retained.’

But now, when he had reached the desired position where, ‘without reference to gain or patronage, he was free to work out his most ambitious conceptions of art, his strength failed him, his hands shook,’ and after two years’ struggle in his mansion on the hill at Hampstead, where Hayley at this period found him ‘solitary and dejected,’ the mistaken man returned in the summer of 1799 to his faithful wife, whom he had only visited twice in thirty years, to learn, Howitt thinks, from her gentle, unreproaching tenderness how much he had lost by leaving her.

It is a melancholy story, this, of man’s ambitious vanity, losing the zest of life for a vapour of laudation from the mouths of men, but a notice of Holly-bush Hill would be incomplete without it. He lingered, rather than lived, till 1802, and died November 15 of that year, reaching to nearly sixty-eight years of age, helpless as an infant. His Hampstead house and its contents were sold, but being ‘wholly without domestic accommodation, and the gallery and painting-room out of all proportion for family requirements,’ the use which Park assigns to it was no doubt the only practical one to which it could be appropriated.

Prejudices, like old traditions, die hard at Hampstead, and I found in 1898 that some very odd ideas of Romney’s residence still obtained there. He was said to have lived for a few years at No. 5, The Mount, and had at the back of his garden, on Holly-bush Hill, an art-gallery or studio, a weather-boarded building of large size. It was said that the existing buildings (also weather-boarded) were the same, but my informant tells me that he was enabled to prove that this was only partially the case.

Besides Hayley’s account of the artist’s mansion on the Hampstead hill, we have Allan Cunningham’s memoir of Romney at hand, in which he tells us that no sooner had the idea of an ampler gallery in a quieter scene than Cavendish Square possessed Romney, than he forthwith purchased the ground, lined out the site, and began to draw his plans; and in 1797 he writes: ‘The strange new studio and dwelling-house which he (Romney) had planned and raised at Hampstead had an influence on his studies, his temper, and his health. He had expended a year, and a sum of £2,733, on an odd and whimsical structure in which there was nothing like domestic arrangements. There was a wooden arcade for a riding-house in the garden, and a very extensive picture and statue gallery.’ The former, I have no doubt, was the weather-boarded building of large size which subsequently represented to popular imagination the picture-gallery of the great painter.

On the sale of this house (probably in 1803, when Romney’s pictures were sold at Hampstead), it was found, as we have said, useless as a residence, and required rebuilding to fit it for the purpose of an Assembly House, which alteration did not take place till 1807, when the premises appear to have been purchased for this speculation by certain gentlemen of Hampstead, who formed themselves into a company, one of whom was the father of the present Mr. George Holford, who possesses documents relating to this building of the above date.[150]

The builder of the Assembly Room was a Mr. Greening. The fact is, I believe, accepted, that it stands where Romney’s house stood, and that some portion of his gallery remains. The whole set of apartments are now used for the Constitutional Club.[151]

Romney is not the only memorable painter associated with the Holly-bush Assembly Room. In later years we find the Nature-loving, tender-hearted Constable, whose ‘fine presence and genial manners’ were long remembered at Hampstead and its vicinity, giving a series of lectures here on the ‘Origin of Landscape Painting,’ and illustrating his theme by reference to local objects.

Lovers of Hampstead Heath well know the Fir-tree Avenue, or, rather, the wreck of it remaining, of which, then in its prime, he made a drawing, on seeing which Blake exclaimed: ‘Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration!’ From his lecture we learn that in his time there had stood at the entrance of the village a tall and elegant ash-tree, the likeness of which he had taken and exhibited to his audience, while he pleasantly told its story:

‘Many of my friends may remember this young lady[152] at the entrance of the village; her fate was distressing, for it is scarcely too much to say that she died of a broken heart. I made this drawing when she was in full health and beauty. On passing some time after I saw, to my grief, that a wretched board had been nailed to her side, on which was written in large letters, “All vagrants and beggars will be dealt with according to law.” The tree seemed to have felt the disgrace, for even then some of the top branches had withered. Two long spikes had been driven far into her side; in another year one half had become paralyzed, and not long after the other shared the same face.’

On the occasion of Constable’s second lecture at the same place we catch a glimpse of Leslie walking across the West End fields to hear it. It was a summer’s evening, and Leslie pauses now and again to watch the splendid combinations of the glorious clouds, and their radiant effect in and upon the landscape—effects which Constable had noticed also, and called attention to in his lecture.

All the then scientific, intellectual, and social life of Hampstead had its headquarters at the Assembly Room on Holly-bush Hill till after the fifties. Here, as I have said, the public balls and concerts, lectures and conversaziones, took place, and all the social problems and local movements that affected the well-being of the town and its inhabitants were discussed here.

Here, too, were held those memorable meetings which had for their object the frustration of the scheme so subtly and surreptitiously devised, to wrest the Heath and its privileges from the copyholders and the general public; and here were resolved on various occasions those prandial and pyrotechnic displays of loyalty that from time to time have borne witness to the strength of this sentiment amongst the inhabitants of Hampstead. Nor is the Holly-bush Tavern, of which the Assembly Room was in 1855 an integral part, without its own interesting associations. It does not look much like a scene of political intrigue, yet on this account, possibly, it was the rendezvous of Carr (Earl of Rochester), Dering and Goring, who during the wars of the King and Parliament met at this house to devise the rising in Kent, Essex, and Hertfordshire. The cosy parlour saw other company in Charles II.’s time, when the wicked ‘dramatists of the Restoration’ were wont ‘to set the table in a roar’ with wit, the sparkle of which, like the phosphorescent glitter of corruption, has vanished at the presence of the healthy light.

Good wine is said to need no bush, but the acceptability of that at the Holly-bush to men who frequented Powlet’s and ‘knew a hawk from a hernshaw,’ where honest port and good claret were in question, had given a prestige to the wayside inn, not lost even when these lines were first written, especially in the estimation of literary men. One must put a mask on (as the women did who listened to his plays) to penetrate the pleasant parlour during the symposia, at which the handsome, but vicious and immoral Wycherley presided. No such compromise in modesty is needed when Goldsmith turns host, and entertains at no small cost (for the little inn had always a reputation for its cuisine), Garrick, Sir Joshua, Boswell, and the Great Leviathan of learning, Dr. Johnson. I forget the occasion on which the dinner at the Holly-bush came off. I have no doubt it commemorated some rare event that had put money in the pocket of our improvident author—the profits of ‘The Good-Natured Man,’ perhaps.

We all know how warmly and truly Johnson regarded Goldsmith, and yet he was capable of wounding him to the quick by his cruel pleasantries. On one occasion—let us hope it was not this—when Goldy, a little jealous of the success of Beattie’s ‘Essay on Truth,’ exclaimed, ‘Here’s a stir about a fellow that has written one book, and I have written many’—‘Ah, doctor, doctor,’ observed the terrible man, ‘there go two-and-forty sixpences to one guinea.’ But time has justified poor Goldy, and the ‘Deserted Village’ is still read, and the delightful ‘Vicar of Wakefield’; Moses and the rest of the Primrose family live on, perennial as their name; while Beattie, except by bookmen, is almost wholly forgotten.[153]

Telford, Leigh Hunt, and Lamb, showed the same faith in the capital cellar and culinary skill to be found at the Holly-bush Tavern. Modern men of their craft have been of the same opinion, and the inn continued till recent times to be a favourite with literary men and artists. The Holly-bush had also the honour (perhaps has it still) of being the headquarters of the Masonic Lodge of St. John; but otherwise its prestige has departed. The Assembly-Room, if it exists, is now the meeting-place of political and other local clubs, and its exterior and surroundings are so altered as to be scarcely recognisable to one who first saw it half a century ago.

To return to the sister eminence, Windmill Hill, so called from having been the site of one of the two windmills that anciently added to the picturesque charms of Hampstead, the mound on which it stood was, when I first knew this delightful spot, plainly discernible in the artificially rising ground on which Netley Cottage stands. In Elizabeth’s time another windmill stood in a field near the church, which Gerard distinguished as the habitat of the white butterfly orchis.

But it is not from its antiquity, old as it is, that Windmill Hill derives its interest, but from the fact of its having been the place of residence for many years of a woman of genius, whose celebrity, so to speak, still clings to it; for apart from Joanna Baillie’s connection with it, there is little to be said of Windmill Hill.[154]

There is a pleasant notice in one of Mrs. Barbauld’s letters from Hampstead of two shy, Nature-loving girls, whom she was constantly encountering in her walks, and who were never so happy as when gathering wild-flowers in the woods and hedgerows, or in seeing the ‘gold-thorn’ blazing on the Heath, or in roaming about the old gravel-pits and water-courses. They were the daughters of her near neighbour, Mrs. Dorothea Baillie, widow of the Rev. James Baillie, D.D., Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, and sisters of the distinguished Dr. Matthew Baillie. But the youngest of these girls was then twenty-two years of age.

Later on (in 1800) Mrs. Barbauld writes to a friend: ‘I have received great pleasure lately from the representation of “De Montfort,” a tragedy, which you probably read a year and a half ago in a volume entitled “A Series of Plays on the Passions.” I admired it then, but little dreamed I was indebted for my entertainment to a young lady whom I visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld’s meetings all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line.’ The play, she adds, is admirably played by Mrs. Siddons and Kemble, and is finely written, with great purity of sentiment and beauty of diction, strength, and originality of character, but it is open to criticism.[155]

Six years later the young poetess (the prologue to whose tragedy had been written by the Hon. Francis North, and the epilogue by the Duchess of Devonshire) had become famous, and her home on Windmill Hill an object of pilgrimage to men of the highest intellectual reputation. Hither came Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers, and, as time moved on, succeeding representative men and women, to pay their tribute of respect and admiration to the successful poetess.

No longer shy, but simple and unaffected, and full of genuine kindness, she appears to have had the faculty of attaching those whom she attracted—notably Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott, whose appreciation of her as a poetess led to life-long personal friendship.

It is noteworthy that on the first occasion of the great novelist, whom a clever critical correspondent of mine calls the ‘greatest second-rate man the world ever saw,’ coming to London in the summer of 1806, the year in which Miss Baillie’s mother died, one of his earliest visits was to his gifted fellow-countrywoman—for the little manse, near Bothwell Brig, in the valley of the Clyde, where her father was minister, was Joanna Baillie’s birthplace—a visit that led to many others on both sides, and a friendship, as I have said, that lasted through life. She tells us that at her first meeting with him she was disappointed, so different was he in appearance from the ideal bard of the ‘Lay,’ which her own poetical mind had imagined. She had pictured an ‘ideal elegance and refinement of feature in the poet,’ ‘but found comfort in looking at the benevolence and shrewdness in the rough-hewn, homely face of her great compatriot; and in the thought that were she in a crowd, and at a loss what to do, she should have fixed upon that face among a thousand, as the sure index of a brave kind nature that would, and could, help her in her strait.’ Yet before they had talked long, she saw in the expressive play of his countenance far more, even of elegance and refinement, than she had missed in its mere lines. Henceforth she and her brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, were amongst the most honoured friends of Sir Walter. The acquaintance on both sides ripened into the most affectionate regard.

Amongst Joanna Baillie’s correspondence, Sir Walter’s letters are about the most interesting. One of them has for the purposes of these pages a twofold interest, not only as showing his admiration of the poetess, but as illustrating the evil reputation of the neighbourhood of Hampstead, and the dangers to which foot-passengers were liable, even at that time. The letter is dated 1811, and was written on the appearance of a new volume of Joanna Baillie’s ‘Plays on the Passions,’ one of them being the passion of Fear, in which appear the lines set to music by Bishop, with which we are all familiar, ‘The Chough and Crow.’

‘Fear, the most dramatic passion you have hitherto touched, because capable of being drawn to the most extreme paroxysm on the stage. In Ozra you have all the gradations from timidity excited by strong and irritable imagination to the extremity which altogether unhinges the understanding. The most dreadful fright I ever had in my life (being neither constitutionally timid nor in the way of being exposed to real danger) was in returning from Hampstead the day which I spent so pleasantly with you. Although the evening was nearly closed, I foolishly chose to take the short-cut through the fields, and in the enclosure where the path leads by a thick and high hedge with several gaps. In it, however, did I meet with one of your thoroughpaced London ruffians—at least, judging from the squalid and jail-bird appearance and blackguard expression of countenance. Like the man who met the Devil, I had nothing to say to him, if he had nothing to say to me; but I could not help looking back to watch the movements of such a suspicious figure, and, to my great uneasiness, saw him creep through the hedge on my left hand. I instantly went to the first gap to watch his motions, and saw him stooping, as I thought, either to pick up a bundle or to speak to someone lying in the ditch. Immediately after he came cowering back, up the opposite side of the hedge, as returning to me under cover of it. I saw no weapon he had except a stick, but, as I moved on to gain the stile which was to let me into the free field, with the idea of a wretch springing upon me from the cover at every step I took, I assure you I would not wish the worst enemy I ever had to undergo such a feeling as I had for about five minutes. My fancy made him of that description which usually combines murder with plunder; and though I was armed with a stout stick, and a very formidable knife, which when open becomes a sort of _shene-dhu_, or dagger, I confess my sensations, though those of a man resolved not to die like a sheep, were vilely short of heroism. So much so that, when I jumped over the stile, a sliver of the wood ran a third of an inch between my nail and the flesh without my feeling the pain, or being sensible that such a thing had occurred. However, I saw my man no more, and it is astonishing how my spirits rose when I got into the open field; and when I reached the top of the little mount, and all the bells of London’ (it was probably on a Sunday evening) ‘began to jingle at once, I thought I had never heard anything so delightful in my life, so rapid are the alternations of our feelings.’[156]

Writing twelve months later, Crabb Robinson relates how, on a morning of May, 1812, meeting Wordsworth in the Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), and getting into the fields, he walked thence with him to Hampstead, where they met Joanna Baillie, whom he thus describes:

‘She is small in figure, and her gait is mean and shuffling, but her manners are those of a well-bred woman. She has none of _the unpleasant airs too common to literary ladies_. Her conversation is sensible. She possesses apparently considerable information, is prompt without being forward, and has a fixed judgment of her own, without any disposition to force it upon others. Wordsworth said of her, with warmth: “If I had to present anyone to a foreigner as a model English gentlewoman, it would be Joanna Baillie.”’

Later writers eulogize her quiet, unobtrusive life in the beloved companionship of her sister, and the enjoyment of the yet unspoiled beauty of Nature which surrounded them. A few steps from their house took them to the Heath, with its glorious sun-risings and sun-settings, its cloud and landscapes, its groups and groves of trees, its ferny hollows, and hillocks, purple or golden in their seasons, with the bells of the common heath, or the glittering peach-scented blossoms of the furze. Twenty-nine years after Crabb Robinson’s meeting with her, in the course of a chatty London letter of Lord Jeffreys to Mrs. Innes, he tells her how after breakfasting with Miss Rogers in Regent’s Park, where they had the poet Murray, the hero of the Pawnees, the Milmans, Sir Charles and Lady Bell, etc. (a most lovely morning, by the way), they drove to Hampstead and saw Joanna Baillie, then in her seventy-fifth year.

It was on the occasion of a visit to her some time before this that Mary Howitt, with her little son Charlton, I believe, had the pleasure of meeting Sir Walter Scott, whose admiration of the fair curls and bright looks of the boy was ever afterwards associated with her remembrance of the kind-hearted author of the Waverley novels.[157]

To the last Joanna Baillie continued to keep a little court for literary callers, and received in her simple, old-fashioned home the homage of the great in rank and intellect. In 1851, at the ripe age of eighty-eight (she was born in 1763), the little churchyard through which she had so often passed received the remains of this lovable and gifted woman.[158]

Her sister, Miss Agnes Baillie, continued to reside at Bolton House, in which she had a number of the windows darkened, so that it came to be called by the children of the Heath ‘the house with the black windows.’ She was becoming very old, and, though sane upon many subjects, had little innocent illusions of going to heaven in the ark, the appearance of which she looked for from day to day. It came at last on April 27, 1861, when she died, aged one hundred years and seven months. Some time before this event a controversy had been going on in a literary paper which questioned the fact of ‘lives of a hundred and upwards,’ whereupon a gentleman wrote to the editor of the _Athenæeum_ as follows:[159]

‘_January 7, 1860._—Permit me to forward a copy of the certificate of birth of a lady in her hundredth year, living at Hampstead, viz., the sister of the well-known authoress Joanna Baillie, and of the deceased Dr. Baillie,’ etc.

The document was lately obtained by Dr. Baillie’s son, Mr. W. H. Baillie, of Upper Harley Street, and is as follows:

‘Copy of an entry in a separate register of the Presbytery of Hamilton under the head of “Sholto.” That Mr. James Baillie has a daughter named Agnes, born 24 September, 1760. Attested and signed at Hamilton the 25 day of November, 1760, in the presence of the Presbytery. Signed (James Baillie); John Kirk, Clerk; Patrick Maxwell, Moderator.’

‘This venerable lady,’ it is added, ‘is still, notwithstanding the recent severe weather, in the enjoyment of her usual health.’

Seven months later she had, as we have seen, joined her sister in the peaceful churchyard; but lives of a hundred years and more have been by no means rare at Hampstead.

In 1895 my attention was directed to a newspaper paragraph, containing a description of the Baillies’ residence at Hampstead, and also to some notes which had appeared from time to time in the _Bookman_, descriptive of remarkable houses in the locality.

The newspaper correspondent’s account of the date of the Baillies’ residence at Hampstead is certainly incorrect. He tells us that the Baillies came to London in 1791, where they lived with their brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, at 16, Great Windmill Street, Piccadilly. In 1802, shortly after the appearance of ‘Plays of the Passions,’ vol. ii., they went with their mother to live at Red Lion Hill, Hampstead, and on her death they removed to Bolton House. The first appearance of ‘De Montfort’ was, as I have shown, in April, 1800, at which time the Barbaulds were living in Church Row, from whence Mrs. Barbauld writes of the Baillies as her near neighbours, which they would not have been had they been living at Red Lion (now Rosslyn) Hill, with the whole length of Hampstead town between them.

The Barbaulds left the neighbourhood for Stoke Newington in 1802, the year this gentleman gives as that of the Baillies’ removal to Hampstead.

Still stranger is the chronology of the writer in the _Bookman_ (1895), who gives the year of their mother’s death (1806) as the date of the Baillies’ removal to Hampstead.