Mr. Chadband might well rebuke the writer who should compare the Welsh

Harp Water to Loch Katrine or Windermere; but there is some pretty

scenery to be looked for about its lower end. One surprising feature

here is Kingsbury Church, that, not 300 yards off a suburban road,

stands among quiet meadows almost out of sight of any house. On a slight

eminence, shaded by funereal evergreens set in a frame of hedgerow

timber, its red roof makes a cheerful spot of colour, and the interior

shows a refreshingly old-fashioned simplicity. So close to London, one

might suppose it a secluded country church, but for the predominance of

elegant tombstones betraying its congregation as no mere villagers. The

original structure has been claimed as Anglo-Saxon. Some antiquarian

spectacles make out here the site of a Roman camp; while there seems

better reason to take this _King’s burgh_ as the first Saxon settlement

in Middlesex, in a sense the nucleus of modern London, when the place

may have been more populous than it is to-day, but for its _annexe_

Neasden. The

[Illustration: HENDON]

village of Kingsbury has drifted nearly a mile to the north, where it

lies stranded about its “Green Man,” past which a by-way from Harrow

leads into the Edgware Road at the hamlet called the Hyde. Hyde House

Farm here, a little off the highway, is understood to have given a

country retreat to Goldsmith, who is heard of as lodging at other points

on the Edgware Road.

The mile or so’s breadth of country stretching two or three miles back

from the Edgware Road, between Kingsbury and Harrow, makes an

extraordinary vacuum in the teeming life of Greater London. For reasons

based on a heavy clay soil, it does not lend itself to builders’

designs. Of late a few villas have straggled on to the lanes between

Kingsbury and its lonely church; else few but scattered farm-buildings

break this green expanse, a preserve of real rurality, traversed by

lanes and hedgerow paths giving solitary ways across brooks and meadows,

northward to Edgware, westward to Harrow, so little trodden that

blackberries can grow ripe here within sound of the Metropolitan Railway

whistles, and the plainest hint of London’s close neighbourhood is a

crop of notices to trespassers. On the north side lurk two isolation

hospitals; in the centre, towards Harrow, come the hamlets of Preston

and Kenton; on the south, at the foot of a bold hill-swell towards

Wembley, lie the buildings of Uxendon Farm, where poor Anthony Babington

was captured to answer for his abortive conspiracy. Horseflesh seems to

thrive on these fat pastures. Though Kingsbury Races have been well

abolished, there are stud paddocks on the Wembley side, as well as great

army stables near the Edgware Road; and it was somewhere hereabouts, if

one be not mistaken, that Mr. Soapey Sponge came to equip himself for

his sporting campaign.

The other side of the Edgware Road is far better populated, for, at the

“New” Welsh Harp, above the “Old” one, it touches the growth of Hendon,

stretching and straggling across almost to the Finchley Road. Our

tram-line passes close to Hendon Station, a mile below the row of old

almshouses where one turns aside to the Church of which Hampstead’s was

once a chapelry. This, with its monuments of dignity, has the air of a

true village church, and its shady churchyard overlooks green slopes.

Beyond Church End comes a knot of lanes, bordered by new and old houses,

one of which belonged to David Garrick. But elsewhere Hendon has grown

too much “up to date,” and its outskirts are beset by huge piles of

public buildings, among them the new newspaper depot of the British

Museum Library. In the southern quarter, dropping to the Brent, one

might think oneself back in London; while to the north greedy tongues of

brick still stretch out over green fields, on which Anthony Trollope’s

readers may remember how Polly Kneefit was wooed and won.

But there are some pleasant field-walks left about Hendon, and as our

tram for the next two or three miles will show us little beside

workhouse palaces and the like, the reader may as well be taken on

towards Edgware by a circuitous route across country. About two miles

north of the Hendon heights another ridge is crowned by the more eminent

features of Mill Hill. For this one may make by two paths starting from

Hendon Churchyard, on either side of a line of villas projecting

northwards. The field-path on the west side is to be preferred for its

open view on the heights of Harrow and Stanmore. After a mile it comes

into a road, that bridges the Great Northern Railway branch to Edgware,

and presently turns up an avenued way, from the top of which a path

mounts over park-like meadows with fine backward prospects, leading into

Mill Hill opposite its “King’s Head.” If here one turned right as far as

the “Adam and Eve,” beside it one could come back to Hendon by the other

path above mentioned, passing near the Great Northern Railway Station,

from which a road climbs to Mill Hill’s “Angel and Crown.” Such a place

has to take the consequences of its loftiness in keeping both its valley

stations at a distance, a mile or so to the south. Down the northern

slope of the ridge lead other pleasant field-ways, that would bring us

to Totteridge on the next swell of land, which belongs to that inlet of

Hertfordshire crossed by the Great North Road.

This finely situated village straggles roomily along the swarded and

shaded ridge road, dropping at the west end into a valley in which lies

its Midland station. Where our paths from Hendon come out upon the road,

to the left we have the Church, making a very modest appearance in face

of a Nonconformist neighbour that turns a conspicuous face to the

south. This is Mill Hill School, founded a century ago as a

Congregational seminary, and now flourishing as an undenominational

public school, which has had among its pupils Judge Talfourd, Lamb’s

friend, and among its masters Dr. Murray, of the “Oxford Dictionary,” an

enterprise begun here in the “Scriptorium,” that made a treasured shrine

till lately destroyed by fire. Older relics are the cedars and other

fine trees, some of them said to have been planted by the hands of

Linnæus, when these grounds made Collinson’s Botanic Garden. The school

has now a chapel that would open the eyes of primitive sectaries, and a

museum representing the natural history of the neighbourhood.

While this school has thrown off all particularity of austere dissent,

Mill Hill bears a banyan-grove of Catholic institutions, which stand

prominent about the ridge, St. Vincent’s Orphanage to the east, at the

other end a Franciscan nunnery with an adjacent industrial school, and

behind it St. Joseph’s Missionary College, its tower crowned by a

conspicuous gilt statue, stamped on the memory of its _alumni_ in all

parts of the heathen world. The place seems thus to be mostly made up of

public buildings, the more so now that barracks have been built at the

east end of the ridge; but of late there appear signs of suburban

invasion towards the Midland station.

The wanderer in no hurry should by all means keep on to the west end of

Mill Hill, and thence mount to Highwood, a height running across to the

next ridge, thus gained most pleasantly when the clay bottom between is

well soaked. Highwood itself is a select hamlet, about the gates of

three mansions and their grounds. The gardens of the Moat Manor make a

sight open on Sundays, and here is another relic of old London,

ex-neighbour of Temple Bar, the Hall of Serjeants’ Inn, re-erected by

the late Serjeant Cox, on the dissolution of the society. Highwood

House, where Coventry Patmore lived in his youth, was once the home of

Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore and of the Zoological

Gardens, who had Samuel Wilberforce for a neighbour. On coming up to a

little patch of green before the “Rising Sun,” one can turn along by a

road of grand old trees hiding these mansions, which presently reaches a

stile looking over to the ridge on which Barnet stands, and here forks,

the left branch going up to Barnet Gate, the right one running airily

along the Totteridge ridge with its mile of village green. Or, a little

way beyond the “Rising Sun,” one might have taken a lane turning left by

the gate of Moat Manor, then presently a field-path to the right, which

goes down and up to the road by Barnet Gate, giving off a left fork to

reach this road nearer Elstree. So near London it is not easy to find a

stretch of country that seems so well to keep its rural innocence wedded

to squirely dignity, though, indeed, its squires are now like to have

the luck of being Metropolitan brewers or newspaper proprietors.

To get back to Watling Street from Highwood, one takes the road downhill

in the other direction, turning to the right where in doubt till Dean’s

Brook is passed, beside which a path cuts across towards the station at

Edgware. Turns to the left would have fetched Mill Hill Midland Station,

whence a path leads to the winding lane that reaches the London end of

Edgware through its dependency Hale. From Hendon the shortest line is

through Colin Dale, by which, perhaps, came a branch of the ancient way

leading over Hampstead Heath.

On the opposite side of the Edgware Road, marked ways go off towards

Kingsbury and Harrow. There is not much to say about Red Hill and the

last two miles of this road, on which the tram-line stops for the

present at the top of the village street, still looking like a real

village, with old inns that hint at its importance in coaching days. The

original name is said to have been _Edgworth_, transplanted into Ireland

by the family of the novelist. On the right turns off the way to the

station, beyond the Church, with its ancient tower. The turning to the

left, for Stanmore, leads in a few minutes to Whitchurch, where Handel

was, or was not, organist for a time; and in the churchyard is the tomb

of William Powell, that Edgware Vulcan whose rhythmic hammerings were

understood to have suggested the melody of the “Harmonious Blacksmith”;

but this legend is doubtful. Dr. W. H. Cummings, in his book on Handel,

claims to have proved it a fable. This church is notable for the Chandos

tombs and the elaborate ornamentation supplied by the prodigal Duke of

Chandos, who was Handel’s patron as well as Hogarth’s. His seat, Canons

Park, still overshadows Whitchurch and the upper end of Edgware with its

timber, but it seems about to share the fate of all “eligible building

land” so near London.

James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, held the then profitable office of

Paymaster-General under Queen Anne, and out of its perquisites built

here what Defoe described as the most magnificent palace in the kingdom,

surrounded by gardens and canals that could be equalled only at Wanstead

Park, another English Versailles, now a playground of East-End

Londoners. The Canons household numbered over a hundred persons,

including a guard to make the rounds of the park at night, and musicians

for giving that despoiler of the public purse the luxury of a full

choral service in his chapel, to accompany a preacher who “never

mentioned hell to ears polite.” At his dinner in public state each

course was proclaimed by a flourish of trumpets. Nor was music the only

art he patronized in an outlay which seems to have given Pope a cue for

his satirical account of Timon’s Villa.

Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around,

The whole a laboured quarry above ground.

The Duke was also a butt for Swift’s sneering muse. The Dean asserts

that he lost by speculation what he had gained by fraud.

His wings are clipped: he tries no more in vain,

With bands of fiddlers to extend his train.

After his death the huge construction vanished like a South Sea bubble,

being literally treated as a quarry for less pretentious buildings, no

one caring to buy a home that had cost a quarter of a million, while the

sumptuous Duke at one time cherished a project for a town palace in

Cavendish Square.

As a relic of his expensive ways, the country hereabouts is still seamed

with green roads which he constructed for driving himself about; then,

it being no one’s business to keep them up, they have fallen into a

state of picturesque abandonment, not altogether admirable in wet

weather. The well-greaved pedestrian would find such a by-way on turning

right from the tram-line at the end of the village to a house

sentinelled by a spreading tree, where this broad, soft lane goes off on

the left. When, after a mile of green solitude, it bends back towards

the high road, he can take a path continuing its former direction, which

leads over the fields to Edgwarebury, a most sequestered hamlet, reached

on wheels by another lane from Edgware. Then beside the first house a

grassy track mounts to the ridge road near Elstree, from which one has a

wide prospect southwards. This road, leading from Elstree to Barnet, is

here the edge of Middlesex.

From Edgware to Elstree the highway mounts for three miles, in about two

gaining the top of Brockley Hill, the beauty-spot of the road, as is

Highwood of the country to its right and Stanmore Common to its left.

Brockley Hill is notable to philanthropists for Miss Wardell’s Scarlet

Fever Convalescent Home, and to antiquaries as the supposed site of the

Roman

[Illustration: RUINED CHURCH AT STANMORE]

Sulloniacæ, while all wayfarers may stop here to admire the view upon

the northern heights of London. Else, the main interest of this part of

Watling Street is its branches along the north side of Canons Park, then

again at Brockley Hill, both for Great Stanmore, that lies about a mile

to the left, Little Stanmore being an _alias_ of Whitchurch. Hence a

footpath wanders across to the larger place, at the crossways outside of

which one can turn up a most shady road to come out on the Common,

without passing through the village.

Stanmore is a roomy and bowery place, that perhaps owes a certain air of

dignified seclusion to the fact of its being reached only by a short

branch of the London and North-Western Railway. The first feature that

strikes one is the handsome new Church, standing beside the ivied shell

of its predecessor, consecrated by Laud, in which some monuments are

preserved; but there was an older church that has disappeared. One next

observes that Stanmore is uncommonly well off for wealthy inhabitants,

to judge by its mansions. The most illustrious of these is Bentley

Priory, showing stately on the side of the wooded ridge westward. This,

taking its name from an ancient monastery, has had notable owners and

visitors. A century ago it was the seat of the Marquis of Abercorn, who

entertained here many celebrities, among them Sir Walter Scott while he

was revising the proofs of “Marmion.” After the death of William IV.

Bentley Priory was occupied by Queen Adelaide, and she died here in

1849. For a time it was turned into an hotel, and when this enterprise

did not prosper, the house was taken for his own residence by a

well-known hotel proprietor. Stanmore Park, to the south, houses a

school; and a golf-ground stretches below the partly artificial mound of

Belmont, looking over to Harrow from its south edge.

On the upper side of the road, mounting beside the grounds of Bentley

Priory, spreads Stanmore Common, a fine piece of heath and copsewood,

whose knolls and hollows are the highest open ground in Middlesex. When

the west end of the Common is left behind by the road, it rises gently

to the highest point (503 feet) at the cross-roads, with an “Alpine

Coffee House” for hospice. The milestone, some 200 yards ahead, marks

the edge of Herts, in which the main road runs on to Bushey and Watford,

with turns dropping to Harrow Weald and Pinner, and ways on the other

side to Aldenham and Elstree.

At the corner of the Common behind Stanmore Hall, above the village, a

path is marked for Elstree, leading down a slope and past a curious

obelisk in a circle of trees, which, like the celebrated monument

discovered by Mr. Pickwick, bears various interpretations, local legends

varying from the tomb of Boadicea to a record of the ending of pursuit

after the Battle of Barnet. The red roofs of Elstree soon come in sight,

and, to the left of it, the Aldenham Lake, another canal reservoir which

plays a fine part in the landscape. Elstree welcomes us into Herts and

back to Watling Street, going on greenly to St. Albans, the oldest city

of England, its Roman structures beheld with such wonder by rude Saxon

invaders that they attributed it to the _Watling_ giants of their

mythology: hence the road seems to have taken on this name.

But one might choose rather to turn towards Harrow and the scenes of our

next chapter. This we can do delightfully in various ways: by the

park-bordered road coming down over Harrow Weald from the highest point

of Middlesex; by a beautiful path beginning near Stanmore Church, to

wind at the foot of the ridge under the grounds of Bentley Priory; or by

a field-way leaving the lowest road to Stanmore on the left, just as it

gets out of Edgware, and holding on past Belmont to the green lanes

about Kenton. The stranger needs no guidance where the far-seen spire of

Harrow makes a beacon.

VI

HARROW AND PINNER

The road to Harrow is as crooked as the Edgware Road is straight.

Through Paddington the former takes puzzling turns, in part forced upon

it by the great railway terminus; and only beyond the “Royal Oak”

station is its course clearly buoyed by red and yellow omnibuses.

Browning lived in this quarter, beside the Regent’s Canal, where he

found a touch of Venice; but it takes a poet’s eye to discover

picturesqueness on the first stages of the Harrow Road, as it mounts

between Westbourne Park and Maida Vale to a confluence of half a dozen

ways at the “Prince of Wales.” Now choked by a tramway, it passes Kensal

Green, London’s largest cemetery, where lie in peace all kinds of

celebrities, from princes to authors, beneath a forest of tombstones,

spaciously enclosed among streets, chimney stacks, gas-works, railway

and canal banks, public houses for the cheering of mutes and

mourners--an elaborate contrast to such a country churchyard as might

make the weary soul half in love with death.

Thence our road runs on through the town that has grown up about

Willesden Junction, which should properly be Harlesden; but, like

Clapham Junction, this labyrinth of bridged platforms has made a wide

cast for a name. A mile or two further the road is no better than a

street; and when it at last gets out into fields across the Brent, the

shades of building begin to close upon it again beside Wembley Park, its

gaps of green soon becoming more and more filled up by the spasmodic

growth of Sudbury, which seems uncertain whether it wants to tack itself

on to Wembley or to Harrow. To the north is designed for it a new growth

styled the Sudbury Model Garden City, whose placarded promises appear in

the fields through which the highway turns shirkingly along the side of

Harrow Hill. Henceforth known as the Pinner Road, this is the shortest

way to the stations at the lower north end of Harrow, and gives off

paths to its high quarters. But to them the arduous approach for wheels

is by the loop road climbing the ridge at Sudbury Hill.

An opener way on foot towards Harrow is by the Paddington Canal, that,

to the left of the road, indulges in most uncanal-like windings, so as

to supply an ornament of the landscape. This may be gained beside

Wormwood Scrubs, which, overcast by a gloomy prison, seems one of the

least attractive parks of London; nor is the canal bank for a time more

pleasant to the eye than to the nose, when one comes in wind of its

refuse-destruction stations. But about Alperton it has pretty views of

the heights of Ealing and Hanwell across the sinuous course of the

Brent; then, as it gets below Horsendon Hill, that tiny Alp may be

ascended for a prospect over green flats broken by straight

railway-lines and by the curves of the canal. The most striking feature

here is the cluster of red roofs on the wooded top of Harrow Hill, to

which we can hold on by paths and lanes. But if we keep the canal bank,

our warning to turn off for Harrow will be the group of idle chimneys at

Greenford Green, the monument of a ruined industry--those aniline dyes,

introduced by Sir W. H. Perkin, which have gone to be made in Germany.

The pleasantest way to Harrow is on the right of its titular road, by

Willesden and Neasden. From the Edgware Road one can turn up Willesden

Lane, rising as a lane of gentility, or by its loop, Brondesbury Park,

leading past the Manor House, transformed into a girls’ boarding-school.

This rejoins Willesden Lane where the latter has become the High Road,

beyond Willesden Green Station in Walm Lane; then for a time one must

bear with a tram-line and other traffic through the meaner part of the

place. But at the sign of “The Case is Altered,” leaving the church

quarter to the left, a way goes up by the “Spotted Dog” and the

Metropolitan Station of Neasden to Neasden Green, here uniting with

Dollis Hill Lane along the north side of Gladstone Park. Thence our way

on to Harrow is rural--the first mile or so, indeed, being rather

commonplace--down to the hollow of the Brent, and up, past the turning

for Kingsbury Church, to a fork of roads at the top of Blackbird Hill.

The left branch leads shadily and windingly above Wembley Park, that

ambitious attempt at a north-western pleasure palace, whose stumpy Tower

of Babel, long at a stick, will now cease to be a landmark and an

eyesore. Beside Barn Hill, on the other hand, one bears to the left

under the Metropolitan Railway, then over the London and North-Western

Railway, skirting the back quarters of Sudbury, and coming into the

highroad below Harrow at the well-named One Hundred Elms Farm. But, if

the clay soil be not too well soaked, the pedestrian may take most of

his way by field-paths through that green interval pointed out under the

head of Kingsbury as refreshingly free from suburbification. I have

walked across it on a fine summer evening without meeting a human being

once I got off the roads.[B]

[B] In my guide _Around London_, the main paths over this interval were

traced from Harrow, but not outwards, a fault that may be here repaired.

The road from Willesden and Neasden forks at the top of its ascent from

the Brent. Follow the right branch till it makes a sharp crook, opposite

which, over a gate (left), a path mounts the side of a spacious paddock.

The stile at the top opens a fine view of the Stanmore and Mill Hill

heights, and henceforth the way is most truly rural. Keep the path

downwards, which beyond the first hedge turns left over a stile, then,

with Harrow Church in view, trends right over a large slope, and wanders

into a lane beside a little bridge at Preston. A sign-post opposite

shows its continuation to Kenton, crossing two foot-bridges and coming

out on the road by a crooked green lane. Across the road, it is

continued past Kenton Lodge by a blind by-way, at the turn of which

another sign-post points the path on to Edgware. Hence its line is

almost straight, made plain by stiles and wicket-gates, over a lane,

past a group of red-brick hospital buildings and up a slope, from the

top of which one sees Whitchurch nestling among the trees of Canons

Park, and the more conspicuous tower of Edgware to the right. In the

last field, near a little brook crossed by a foot-bridge, this path

joins one from Edgware to Harrow, which of course would make a

roundabout route from Kingsbury, yet worth taking for its long stretch

of green. The direct way for Harrow is to turn left on the lane from the

bridge at Preston, going up to crossways marked by a block of buildings

that seem to have strayed out of a London street. Opposite this, on the

right, a field-path leads to Woodcock Hill, and across the road here, by

the north side of the farm, goes on to Harrow, traversing the

North-Western and Metropolitan lines near where they intersect each

other.

So, by one way or other, we come to Harrow Hill, on which stands up the

“visible church” of Charles II.‘s little joke. This hill, or isolated

ridge, not so high as Hampstead, with a slighter topping of sand, wears

a trim wig of houses and gardens instead of shaggy heath, and most of it

is enclosed. The openest part is about the north end, where the church

spire rises so conspicuously looking across the Thames Valley to Eton

and Windsor, while over smoky London the Crystal Palace may be seen, or

even the tower on Leith Hill. To the eye of faith, a dozen counties lie

in view. For enjoying this prospect, there are seats on the terrace

outside; but the consecrated view-point is that tombstone--railed in

from relic-stealing admirers, as graves in Thames-side churchyards were

fortified against the ghoulism of body-snatchers--on which Byron loved

to lie in pensive reverie, and to gaze at the setting sun. From his

_Hours of Idleness_ it may be gathered

[Illustration: HARROW]

that the discipline of Harrow was looser in that day, when his

playfellows seem to have roamed the country somewhat freely and

adventurously at risk of “the rustic’s musket aimed against my life,”

getting now and then into mischief, as the young poet confesses:

Nor shrunk beneath the upstart pedant’s frown,

And all the sable glories of his gown.

Their unlicensed sport of Jack-o‘-lantern hunting by night was not put

down finally till long after the abolition of the once famous Silver

Arrow contest. One feature in Byron’s amusements suggests poetic as well

as scholastic license--“the streams where we swam” and “shared the

produce of the river’s spoil.” “Ducker” was not yet made; it could

hardly be the Paddington Canal that offered “buoyant billows.” “Brent’s

cool wave,” if cleaner then, is a matter of three miles off at Perivale,

which, as we learn from prosaic authorities, was the favourite

bathing-place of that day. Such smaller streams as trickle about Harrow

could yield no better spoil than sticklebacks. The one thing wanting to

its prospects is a river like the “hoary Thames,” by which rival

scholars,

Full many a sprightly race,

Disporting on its margin green,

The paths of pleasure trace.

About this height, shining in Dr. Parr’s eyes “with the united glories

of Zion and Parnassus,” cluster the buildings of a school that stands

high among “our public hives of puerile resort.” The Church had been

built by Lanfranc, when “Herga” was a manor and seat of the Canterbury

Primates. The School was founded under Elizabeth by John Lyon, that

public-spirited squireen or yeoman of Preston, at which his house still

stands, and he has a memorial in the church among other old brasses and

ornaments. The tercentenary of his school came in 1871, when a fund was

raised among Harrovians to add the new buildings that throw into shade

their old schoolroom, boasting the names of Byron, Peel, Palmerston, and

others destined to be carved on our national records. The chapel is

rather older, but till two generations ago the boys attended the Parish

Church. Scattered around are the boarding-houses that have sprung up

about a modest nucleus; then further afield come the playing-grounds,

almost as important as schoolrooms in contemporary theories of

education.

Harrow has had its ups and downs; but long ago it passed out of the rank

of a provincial grammar-school, and it now counts some 600 scholars who,

what with work and play, have not much time for lying on tombstones and

gazing at sunsets. Under rulers of Liberal sentiments, it came to be

looked on as rather the Whig public school; yet, as sign of scholastic

conservatism, the costume of the upper boys is still the absurd

swallow-tail coat of our great-grandfathers, which produces a most

incongruous effect when worn with a straw hat and flannel trousers. The

Duke of Genoa, who lived with Matthew Arnold, and had the crown of Spain

offered him as still a Harrow schoolboy, was precociously bearded while

his rank in the school kept him in short jackets; then the arbiters of

such matters were for granting him the privilege of “charity tails”; but

the young Prince is understood to have refused such a distinction till

earned by merit.

That pious founder would rub his eyes could he see to what has grown the

school he meant, no doubt, mainly for the benefit of his neighbours’

boys, though he allowed the entrance of “foreigners,” who have ousted

the natives. The sons of yeomen and tradesmen are now provided for by a

humbler seminary, an inch of the endowment being appropriated to them

rather than an ell. But as day-boys are admitted as well as boarders in

the masters’ houses, families of the better class have been brought to

settle here, to the prospering of Harrow, now expanded with a population

of over 10,000, spread out in smart streets and lines of villas that run

into once outlying hamlets.

Nearly two miles to the north lies Wealdstone, a village that gives a

sub-title to Harrow’s railway station on the London and North Western

Railway. The Metropolitan and Great Central station, distinguished as

Harrow-on-the-Hill, comes a mile nearer on the same road, at Greenhill.

Now the District Railway has an electric line to Roxeth, on the south

side of Harrow Hill. The school authorities appear not much concerned to

promote close intercourse with Metropolitan distractions; and as yet

they have been able to play Canute to the trams threatening to advance

from Harlesden. Therein they ill follow the example of John Lyon, who

left part of his endowment for improving the roads that, on this heavy

clay soil, kept waggons a whole day jolting from Harrow to London.

The meadows round the hill are traversed by foot-ways, some of them,

indeed, overlaid by new roads; but there still run many pleasant paths

through the fields, and Harrow’s learned masters profess to be able to

find their way for a dozen miles across country, with few interruptions

of macadam. By such paths, eastwards, one can make for the hamlets of

Kenton and Preston, and so on to Edgware or Kingsbury over that interval

of open country already mentioned. Westwards, over flatter ground, lie

the leafy hamlets we shall come to presently from Pinner. Southwards are

reached the still genuine villages of Northholt, Greenford, and Yeading,

in that “Pure Vale” of our next chapter. Northwards the wooded brow of

Harrow Weald makes a contrast of scenery, to which the straight way is

by the populous road through Wealdstone and the further village called

Harrow Weald, a name representing the slope of forest now trimmed and

enclosed as private parks. Through these the road leads up to the

“Hare,” where to the left opens Harrow Weald Common, and a mile further

on the cross-roads at the edge of Bushey Heath mark that highest point

of Middlesex we have already reached from Stanmore.

It is a good hour’s walk from Harrow Church to its lofty common. Feet

impatient of road-tramping can reach it a little more deviously by

turning off to the left, nearly a mile beyond Wealdstone, at the

“Alma.” This path may seem not very promising at first, but it bends as

a bit of road round an enclosure, and ends as a green lane leading up to

the road through Hatch End at the foot of the ridge. On the other side

of this road, a few paces to the right, opens a narrow path, converging

with a better one that goes off through wicket-gates at the corner in

the other direction, towards Pinner. This mounts up to a farm and thence

to a pretty hamlet bearing the nickname “Harrow Weald City,” beside

which one gets on to the Common, a broken and roughly-wooded expanse

commanding fine views from its knolls and edges. At the west end is the

park enclosure of Graeme’s Dyke House, the home of Mr. W. S. Gilbert,

who here figures as a grave magistrate and substantial squire, but

elsewhere has dealt in “magic and spells.” The name he spells so is from

Grim’s Dyke, a very ancient rampart which has been held to mark the

limit of Belgic intrusion among Celtic tribes; but the same name belongs

to similar works in other parts of England, and the origin of this one

seems uncertain. It may be traced as a slight swell in the meadows to

the right of a road hence descending to join Oxhey Lane, the way for

Watford, across which a path along the Dyke holds on to Pinner.

The highroad from Harrow to Pinner is not very pleasing in its first

stage; but here again the pedestrian may turn a little out of his way

with advantage. A lane to the right, near the Recreation Ground, brings

him up to the Headstone, now a picturesquely moated farm, once a seat

of the Archbishops of Canterbury; and thence a field-path rambles

greenly on to Pinner Church. On the other side of the highroad, one

could have taken a path, westward from the cricket field below Harrow

Church, to the rifle butts, where it ends as a lane presently crooking

north to lead into the shady outskirts of Pinner.

Pinner is a good old village that has taken a vigorous new growth on the

stalk of the Metropolitan Railway, rooted in the business quarters of

London. It still keeps an air of rustic charm among the sophistications

of villadom, and it is ringed about with parks and pretty

hamlets--Pinner Green further on the road, Eastcote to the south,

Woodridings and Hatch End to the north, connected by crooked lanes and

green paths, which, indeed, begin to be too often cut up by builders.

Its heart may be marked at the station of the Metropolitan line, which

here plays the part of landlord as well as carrier. From the railway and

the Pin brook, turns up the main street, showing some old houses, real

and artificial, as it mounts to the Church, an ancient one, altered and

restored with picturesque effect in its shady nook. In the churchyard

stands prominent the ivy-wreathed tomb of William Loudon, a Scotsman,

who a century ago had the whim of directing that he should be buried

above ground, as he is in this curious structure. It is more than a mile

on to the London and North Western station, which, near a lordly pile of

Commercial Travellers’ schools, marks the north purlieus of the place,

whence one can ascend to Harrow Weald and Bushey Heath by Grim’s Dyke

or by the path from Hatch End already mentioned.

On this rising ground it is less easy to miss one’s way; but I despair

of helping my reader not to lose himself in the labyrinth of shady

roads, muddy, grassy lanes and bowery paths that lead southwards and

westwards from Pinner, through a delightful country, difficult to

describe without a repetition of hackneyed epithets. The best I can do

is to recommend him to No. 1 of a little series of penny guides

published at the booking offices of the Metropolitan Railway, in which

he has a selection of these ways traced for him; or he might find the

west section of my guide _Around London_ of use, like other pathfinders

of the kind. But the advice I should give myself, if at leisure on a

fine day, would simply be to get lost in a leafy maze dotted with

guide-posts to keep one from going far astray, even without the help of

map and compass.

One ramble of two or three hours to be suggested is by a chain of

old-world villages, such as often surprise one in this populous county,

as do quaint, tumbledown cottages here and there preserved like flies in

the amber of a spick-and-span suburb. But how long will these hamlets

keep their rusticity, now that they are threaded by the Metropolitan

branch to Uxbridge, not to speak of the new Great Central and Great

Western joint line to Wycombe? Before the foul breath of London has

blighted them, let my client, by one of two or three ways, make for

Eastcote, a most rustic straggling of cottages a mile or two south-west

from Pinner. When he has got to the end of this village on the road to

Ruislip, a bridge on the right shows him where to take a field-path

along a brook, then under the edge of the large Park Wood, in which is

set Ruislip Lake, another of those canal reservoirs that make such a

fine show in Middlesex. It lies to the west side of the wood, through

which a way to it might be found from Pinner Green or from the “Ship” of

Eastcote.

The village of Ruislip stands to the south of Park Wood, where the

Church shows its flint tower set on a rise among fat farms, beside the

course of the brook we have followed from Eastcote. This low height

marks a watershed, for the brook wanders on by Ickenham and Hillingdon

to the Colne, whereas the streams on the other side unite to make the

Crane. Ruislip Church is dedicated to St. Martin, as may be guessed from

a niched figure on the west front representing that charitable soldier

in the act of dividing his cloak; and from its size one may understand

how it was no ordinary parish church, but connected with a monastic

community, whose land here passed into the hands of a Cambridge college.

It ranks among the finest village churches in the county, the parish

itself being larger and more populous than appears from the picturesque

knot of houses clustered about this central point. The churchyard

commands a pleasant prospect over swells of wood and meadow, that fall

to duller aspects, cut off by the Metropolitan branch passing to the

south of the village.

[Illustration: PINNER]

By a passage beside the picturesque old “Swan,” opposite the Church,

there is a way across Ruislip Park, on whose privacy the builder has set

seals of doom. This leads into the road for Ickenham, about a mile off,

beyond the Great Western Railway station for both villages, each of them

having an adjacent “halt” of the Metropolitan line, that begins to sow

suburban villas on the fields it has ploughed up, where as yet real

cottages bear their crop of ruddy cheeks and hobnailed boots. Ickenham

seems a still quieter and quainter hamlet than Ruislip; and its old

Church’s shingled spire, set among time-weathered tombs, makes a better

match with the surroundings than does the baronial pump by the pond

opposite. This, like a true country village, lies under the squirely

shadow of Swakeleys, the best-preserved seventeenth-century manor-hall

left in Middlesex, if Holland House be put out of account. It was built

by a city father shortly before the Civil War, soon after which, when in

the hands of another Lord Mayor, it came to be visited with due

admiration by Mr. Pepys, who saw there one odd sight, the body of a

black boy which his master had dried to keep in a box. The only fault

the garrulous diarist had to find with the place was as “not very modern

in the garden nor house, but the most uniform in all that ever I saw.”

Swakeleys may be brought to sight by taking a footpath opposite the

parsonage, beyond Ickenham Church, which leads into the park. After

crossing several stiles, one can follow the right branch of the path

into the drive, passing along the course of a stream that here forms an

artificial sheet of water, across which the mansion shows its mellowed

front. On coming out of the park, one finds a rising footway on the

left, marked “Uxbridge,” which in a mile or so leads to the east end of

the town by a road coming over the high ground of Uxbridge Common; or

Belmont Road, diverging on the right, would emerge near the west end,

passing the Metropolitan Station. Instead of making for Uxbridge from

the gate above mentioned, one might turn back by a track through

Swakeley Park, giving an excellent view of the mansion from the

south-west, well seen also, when the leaves are off, from the lodge on

the road between Ickenham and Uxbridge, into which this path leads. A

branch of the same road takes one through the Hillingdon Parks to the

Uxbridge tram-line, struck a mile or so short of the town, at what is

the most Arcadian reach of this rather useful than ornamental highway.

Ruislip and Ickenham may also be gained from Northwood, the next station

on the Metropolitan main line, three miles beyond Pinner, where London

has again sown a thicket of suburban avenues among patches of wild wood

and banks of sand. By the golf-links, to the left of the high-road, a

path leads past Ruislip Lake and its woods to an outlying hamlet visited

by modest tea-feasters, from which it is a short mile to Ruislip Church;

or just beyond Northwood Church, further on, one can take a road to

Ickenham or Uxbridge, passing over Duck’s Hill, through reaches of

wood, then almost touching the lake at the hamlet above mentioned,

where, by its “Six Bells,” goes off to the right a path for Harefield.

On old maps one observes how large a stretch of this leafy ground is

Ruislip Common, and it may be as well not to ask how so much of it came

to be enclosed as game preserves and such-like.

On the other side of the Metropolitan Railway at Northwood, the

Hertfordshire border is marked by the Oxhey Woods, through which one

might ramble on past the secluded Oxhey Chapel, and near the London and

North-Western main line as a guide to Watford. The high-road reaches the

edge of Middlesex at the top of the ascent beyond Northwood Church,

where it comes out on Batchworth Heath, a spacious village green about

the gates of Moor Park. Here, from an open height of about 350 feet,

there is a view over Harrow Hill upon London and the Surrey hills

beyond; and hence, by a right of way across the park, one can walk on to

Rickmansworth. But to keep in Middlesex one must turn left from the

high-road on to high ground over the valley of the Colne, with the Grand

Junction Canal running beside it as the straightest way to Uxbridge.

These are only hints of rambles in this hilly and thickly-wooded

north-western corner, which one is tempted to proclaim as the _bouquet_

of the county’s scenery. But then, one had another opinion when fresh

from the parks and meadows of the north-eastern corner beyond Enfield,

or from Hampstead Heath, or from the high ground about Stanmore.

Without attempting to adjudge the golden apple among such rivals, let us

next turn to a part of Middlesex that can put in no claim to the prize

of beauty, although Cobbett _faisait des siennes_ in spurning its flats

as “all ugly.”

VII

THE WESTERN ROADS

On the somewhat flat south-western corner of Middlesex, the most zealous

advocate may find it more difficult to call evidence to character than

on behalf of its northern heights. Yet cyclists and horses might have a

good word to say for this plain, over which three main arteries of

traffic run from the west end of London--the Uxbridge road, the Great

Western road by Slough, and the South-Western road diverging from the

latter at Hounslow. Along these highways let us string the spots of

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

the county describable as attending rather strictly to business.

From Shepherd’s Bush the Uxbridge road is distinguished by the first

long line of electric trams that led out of London to the furthest edge

of Middlesex. The Metropolitan boundary is soon crossed as this tram

slides into Acton Vale, to the right of which a shabby fragment of Old

Oak Common, adjoining Wormwood Scrubs, was once a resort for its mineral

wells; and in our own generation a futile attempt was made at setting

up here a popular pleasure ground. It looks for a little as if the road

were getting into open country, but soon the streets of Acton undeceive

us, stretching on to Ealing. This _Oak Town_, whose first record is as

pasture-ground for the Bishop of London’s pigs, has had noble and

notable residents in its time, Baxter’s _Saints’ Rest_ having been

written here, as well as some of Bulwer Lytton’s novels. At present it

is not an Elysian suburb, even its open spaces being much enclosed as

athletic arenas; but it has two bits of park on either side of the

highway, and turning up Horn Lane from the rebuilt Church, one comes on

a hollow called the Steyne, that gives some hint what the place was in

its village simplicity. The pleasantest part of it seems Acton Green, a

mile to the south, bordering the “æsthetic” amenities of Bedford Park.

At the west end of Acton, just before the road reaches Ealing Common,

stood Fordhook, Fielding’s house, at one time occupied by Byron’s widow,

that only since the coming of the tram has given place to homes for

reformed Tom Joneses and respectable Pamelas of our generation. Among

these spick-and-span houses, the name of a brand-new road, Twyford

Avenue, invites the pedestrian to a rural digression. At the top of it,

what is still a hedged path leads on under the slope of Hangerhill, a

park on which golf has laid its privy paw as on so many about London.

This path debouches beside the open space enclosed as Park Royal to make

a permanent show-ground for the Royal Agricultural Society, an

experiment that proved a failure. Passing to the left, one soon reaches

Twyford Abbey on the bank of the Brent, where green slopes and the

remains of a fine avenue seem threatened on all sides. To this smallest

parish near London a tributary brook gives the name so common among

England’s double fords. The modern mansion, titled on surmise of an

abbey having once stood here, has quite recently deserved its name by

passing to a community of foreign monks, whom the whirligig of time

brings to seek refuge in our heretical island. These Catholic owners

fail to provide a parson for the adjacent extraparochial chapel or

miniature church, that does no credit to the Anglican Establishment. For

want of a congregation as well as an officiant, Twyford Church stands

secluded in silent decay, not yet come to the point of picturesqueness,

its windows broken, its graves neglected, the path leading to it choked

by weeds. Hence, turning a mile or so westward down the Brent, one

reaches another of the many “smallest churches in England,” whose name,

Perivale, has been interpreted as _Parva_; but in old books it bears

more than one _alias_, “Peryfare” and “Purevale.”

The Pure Vale seems to have been a title of admiration given to the rich

valley south of Harrow--a name which must have had a wider extent than

this tiny parish, if Drayton kept within the bounds of poetic license in

making the Colne perceive Perivale “pranked up with wreaths of wheat.”

This whole countryside was long famed for wheat, as it now is for hay;

and Fuller says of Perivale, what has also been boasted for Heston,

near Southall, that it had the honour of supplying flour for the King’s

table. Perivale Church is in very different case from its luckless

neighbour, its ancient structure well restored and well cared for; and,

while each parishioner of the tiny parish might have a couple of pews to

himself, on summer Sundays it seldom lacks an overflowing congregation

taking excuse for a stroll from Ealing. Ealing, indeed, grows towards it

across a green flat, on which the Brent makes sinuous windings as

natural hazards for a golf-course.

One might hence follow the river on a byroad, circumventing the

tram-line through Ealing and Hanwell, two adjacent places as to which

the story is told of Thackeray’s--or who was it?--suggestion to the

railway authorities that the porters should be changed who proclaimed

them as _H_ealing and ‘Anwell. Ealing is such a favourite residential

suburb that it now extends for two miles along the road, and on either

side has turned private grounds and mansions into streets and

playgrounds. On the right rises the dignified quarter of Castlebar Hill,

over which are ways to the new park on the Brent; on the left lies

Ealing Common, then, further on, Walpole Park, with its fine old timber,

thrown open since the death of Miss Perceval, sister of the murdered

Prime Minister, who survived to the beginning of this century as a link

with days when Ealing was a Middlesex village, not yet a cantonment of

Anglo-Indians and the like. It is not so over-built but that patches of

green and pleasant foot-ways are still found about a place which can

boast to be the

[Illustration: OLD MANOR HOUSE, NEAR ICKENHAM]

birthplace of Huxley and the burial-place of John Horne Tooke. A noted

private school here had in its day such pupils, destined to varied fame,

as Charles Knight, Thackeray, Newman, and the Lawrence brothers. Bulwer

Lytton also was pupil of a clergyman, with whom he seems to have got on

less ill than with most of his instructors. In the upper part of Ealing,

near its conspicuous water-tower, stands the Princess Helena College,

which has made its mark in the new education of girls; and there are

other flourishing schools that now may be rearing the philosophers,

novelists, and statesmen of the next generation.

We need not ask too closely where Hanwell begins, this suburb being a

little shy of its name, shadowed by a huge County Lunatic Asylum, which

really belongs to the more idyllic parish of Norwood, to the south.

Perhaps the cemeteries on either side of the high-road may be taken as

the junction-point, and we are certainly in Hanwell when the tram-road

makes an abrupt drop to cross the valley of the Brent. A little way

below, the river becomes merged with the Grand Junction Canal,

descending at the back of the Asylum by a chain of locks which recall

those of Trollhatta or Banavie on a small scale, beside what seems a

miniature edition of the Great Wall of China. Walking to Brentford on

the tow-path for a couple of miles, one might fancy oneself in the heart

of a rather common-place country, where straggling curls of the tamed

river show scum almost as green as its banks; but the solitude is

disturbed by a tram-line close at hand.

If that by-way is not very attractive, up the Brent one can turn through

one of the prettiest bits of Izaac Waltondom so near London. The ground

on this side is laid out as a park below the tall viaduct of the Great

Western Railway, whose passengers have such a good view of the isolated

Church. Behind the church starts a path making a chord to the vagrant

bends of the Brent, till the stream turns eastwards beside a road

towards Perivale. Across this road the path holds on to the old Church

of Greenford, that has some notable relics under its shingled spire and

tiled roof, showing through a clump of trees which help the green

meadows to bear out the name of the village. The road through Greenford

goes on to Harrow by Greenford Green, whose name does not so well answer

to its promise of rusticity. But over the fields beside Greenford Church

one may take a mile of footpath leading across the canal to Northholt,

_alias_ Northall, another of those real, quaint, roomy villages that

surprise one in out-of-the-way nooks about London, saved from the

builder, perhaps, by a heavy clay soil that makes bricks to deface less

secluded parishes. As unspoiled as the village seems its weather-worn

little Church, standing on a knoll beside the broad sward of roads

knotting themselves together here. Northwards one finds a charming path

that, ending as a green lane, leads almost into the south suburbs of

Harrow. In the other direction the canal bank would bring us back to the

road at Southall.

There was a Southholt once, which, corrupted by the evil communications

of the high-road, has changed its name as well as its nature. I can

remember Southall when it could still be called a pleasant country nook,

half village, half distant suburb; but in one generation it has waxed to

what it is now, a somewhat commonplace outgrowth of London, which for a

time was the tram terminus. It has a weekly cattle market as its most

bucolic feature; and there are still some pleasant fields to be found on

either side. And that is all to be said about Southall, unless that

beside it unite the two branches of the Grand Junction Canal, hence

running on straight to West Drayton, where it turns north up the valley

of the Colne.

Across the Paddington arm of the canal the highroad comes upon veritable

turnip-fields, as it goes on to Uxbridge, passing the hamlets of Hayes,

a scattered village whose manor-house made one of the Archbishops of

Canterbury’s many seats, the dignity of which seems to survive in the

spacious parsonage. The fine restored Church contains some old

monuments, notably, beside the altar, Sir Edward Fenner’s tomb with

coloured effigy; it has also a much-faded wall painting of St.

Christopher in the north aisle, and a discarded altar-piece representing

the “Adoration of the Magi.”

Hayes Town, as the church precinct styles itself, lies to the left of

the way, down a turning opposite the “Adam and Eve.” On the right the

Yeading brook waters a stretch where itself seems the pleasantest

feature. Here comes another of those odd blanks in the map of

Middlesex, a flat of sodden green, looking at home when wrapped in a

November mist, through which loom snug farmhouses, but it is else so

unpopulated that only one road runs across it, by Yeading to Ruislip and

Ickenham. Bold explorers, perhaps, might here find a touch of adventure

in trespassing against notices which block approach to that devious

brook, over a country of such agricultural note that it is not to be

sneezed at unless by sufferers from hay fever. The Yeading Brook,

further down promoted to the title of the Crane River, should have

observance as the largest stream belonging entirely to Middlesex. It

rises in two forks on the slopes about Harrow, and after flowing right

across the county, has two mouths into the Thames, one of them with the

by-name of the Isleworth River.

As the tram approaches Uxbridge, the scenery on the right improves in

the swelling parks of Hillingdon, through which leafy lanes and paths

wind over to Swakeleys and Ickenham. This, indeed, is one of the

pleasantest square miles in Middlesex, filled up with the grounds and

gardens of goodly mansions; and the golfers, upon whom one of its slopes

seems wasted, have a better chance of attending to their game on less

comely enclosures passed further back. Should any pedestrian doubt my

word for it, let him turn up to the right opposite Hillingdon Church, by

the “Vine,” following this by-way as far as the lodge gate of Hillingdon

House on the left, just beyond which he may take a path through the

park, to be brought back to the highroad as it enters Uxbridge, with

little deviation

[Illustration: UXBRIDGE]

from his straight way. But, first, he would do well to stop at

Hillingdon Church, a spaciously handsome one, containing brasses and

monuments, conspicuous among them the Onslow and Paget tombs on either

side of the altar. In the churchyard is the tomb of Rich, the celebrated

harlequin and lessee of Covent Garden.

Hillingdon was the mother church of Uxbridge, whose long main street is

sentinelled, a mile further on, by the tall modern spire of St.

Andrew’s; then, further along, the older Parish Church stands hidden

behind the Market Hall, so closely squeezed into the same block of

building that there is no room for a chancel. This border borough,

thriving on corn-mills and other industries, has more the look of an

independent market town than any in Middlesex. Till lately a certain

awkwardness of communications kept Uxbridge rather out of the way,

served only by a branch from the Great Western Railway at West Drayton,

as it once was by slow canal-boats; but now it has a Metropolitan line

from Harrow, besides the electric tram that runs through it to the top

of the descent by which the road falls to cross the Colne. The meaning

of the name has been matter of controversy, but probably this bridge was

christened from the Celtic word for water that appears in _usk_, _esk_,

_axe_, _uisk_, _whiskey_, and other forms.

Uxbridge has a population of some 9,000, its thickly inhabited outskirts

left out of account. The chief event in its history is the meeting here

in 1645 of Commissioners appointed by Charles I. and the Parliament to

negotiate terms of peace. The mansion in which their fruitless

deliberations were held has been much altered, and is now an inn, but it

still proudly exhibits itself as the “Treaty House” by the road at the

west end of the town, and part of the interior is preserved in its old

dignity. The sign of this inn was an inheritance from the “Crown,” at

which the King’s Commissioners lodged, those of the Parliament finding

quarters at the “George,” further back in the chief street. Beyond the

“Treaty House,” first crossing the canal by a very Piscatorish-looking

tavern and a large mill, we pass the Colne into Buckinghamshire.

The finest scenery about Uxbridge comes over the river in the county on

which we must here turn our backs. Good Pisgah views of it can be had

from the high ground of Uxbridge Common to the north of the town, by

which goes out an airy road towards Rickmansworth, with branches for the

quiet villages we visited from Pinner. Southwards the road by the river

and the canal is not so pleasant, populated by various industries about

Cowley, in whose churchyard was buried Dr. Dodd, the divine hanged for

forgery, 1777. But opener and more agreeable country is reached at West

Drayton, where, having passed its scattered hamlets on the canal, we

find houses not so thick as good old trees about its green, and

picturesque nooks by the branching swirls of the Colne. From the Church,

enclosed in a park to the left, a fine avenue leads southwards, ending

in paths and lanes that, by the villages of Harmondsworth or

Harlington, make pleasant ways into the central western highway.

This, once renowned as the Bath Road, begins for Londoners with

Piccadilly, leading by the south side of the Park to Kensington,

Hammersmith, then by Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Gunnersbury to the

busy end of Kew Bridge, lately rebuilt. Beyond, it enters the main

street of Brentford, so narrow that one calls out at finding this

thoroughfare choked with a tram-line, as it once was with flying

Roundheads in a hot fight of the Civil War.

Brentford is styled the county town of Middlesex, but has little honour

in its own country; and if its two fabulous kings were content to sit

here on one throne, the County Council prefers a more dignified seat at

Westminster. Like Washington or Ottawa, indeed, it seems to be an

artificial capital, originally having no rank but as dependency of the

adjoining parishes of Ealing and Hanwell. This dirty place, besides

bearing an old bad name for bear-baitings, election riots, and the like

disorders, has been a butt for metropolitan poets ever since Falstaff

was disguised and drubbed as the fat witch of Brentford. The author of

the _Rehearsal_ made it the scene for his burlesque. Johnson satirically

coupled its name with Glasgow, in which he showed his ignorance, as all

travellers of that century insist on the neatness and prettiness of the

Clyde city before its days of grimy wealth. Thomson, in his _Castle of

Indolence_, takes this “town of mud” to be a fit stage for pig-driving,

where motor-cars now “gruntle to each other’s moan”; Goldsmith unkindly

suggests it as goal for a race between “a turnip-cart, a dust-cart, and

a dung-cart”; and other contemporary bards affect the same nose-holding

attitude towards poor Brentford, their complaints, as a certain

guide-book dryly says, being in our day echoed by sanitary inspectors.

Of late the squalid county seat shows grace to be somewhat ashamed of

itself, and has a scheme in view for sweeping and garnishing. Let us

hurry through its show of gas-works, chimney-stacks, dingy wharves and

slums about the mouth of the Brent, only noticing that at the Church and

the Town Hall, near the bridge, the place attains a certain point of

quaint ugliness not without attraction, and that its squalid waterside

features set in relief the blooming of Kew Gardens across the Thames.

There are some pleasanter aspects to the right, where, by Old Brentford

and Boston House, the town begins to merge with the spreading outskirts

of Ealing; but as to New Brentford, as it once was, its motto should be

_Guarda e passa_.

When the road has crossed the Brent it passes, on the left side, the

noble demesne of Syon House, which the tram-traveller might flit by

unawares but for an ornate gate revealing the grounds. From a

right-of-way crossing the park to Isleworth Church on the river bank,

can be had a fuller view of the mansion, crowned by that lion so long

familiar to Londoners over Northumberland House, there said, on some

such authority as that local worthy, the late Mr. Joe Miller’s,

[Illustration: SYON HOUSE, BRENTFORD: GARDEN FRONT]

to wag its tail whenever it heard noon struck at Westminster. This

stately structure, rebuilt by the Adams, had been a rich nunnery

“conveyed” to the Lord Protector Somerset, and is now a seat of the

Dukes of Northumberland. The community of nuns long held out at Lisbon,

keeping the keys of their English home; but when, a century ago, they

showed them to the Duke of that day, he is understood to have bluntly

remarked that the locks had been altered. Another treasure of these nuns

has been brought back to their native country--the famous Syon Cope, an

elaborate specimen of mediæval embroidery now preserved at South

Kensington Museum.

On the other side of the road one may turn up to the Earl of Jersey’s

Osterley Park, first enclosed by Sir Thomas Gresham of City renown, the

house rebuilt for Childs the bankers. The park extends over a well

timbered and watered flat which Horace Walpole called the ugliest in the

world; but that in our day seems a slander. By a road through it, or

round its precinct, one can reach the villages of Norwood Green and

Heston, where Middlesex does not want its common beauty of groves and

gardens. This would be a cyclist’s or pedestrian’s pleasantest way on to

beyond Hounslow, for the highroad, skirting Isleworth, has not much to

say for itself.

Nor is there much to be said for Hounslow when we get there--a long,

unlovely town, its brightest spots of colour the uniforms of soldiers

quartered at its barracks or in a camp beside the Crane. Hounslow Heath

has been used for many camps, and it had once an ill name as

headquarters of knights of the road, whose prowess made the journey to

Bath an adventure; but there is little trace of its wildness now. It

seems to be all enclosed, except the plain to the left occupied by that

permanent camp, with its fortification of barbed wire. This was the

scene of an interesting experiment made in training a company of young

soldiers, at the expense of the _Spectator_ and its readers. Besides the

preparation of food for powder, another industry of the neighbourhood is

the powder-mills to be found along the course of the Crane, locally

known as the Powder Mill River; but they are naturally of a retiring

disposition.

In the long street of Hounslow the road forks at a spot once grimly

marked by the gibbets of highwaymen. The right branch is the Bath Road,

soon passing an inn which proclaims itself the half-way house between

London and Windsor, and in two miles crossing the Crane to Cranford.

This is not the Cranford of Mrs. Gaskell’s delightful story, but a very

pleasant village in its way, perhaps the prettiest place on the road,

which had Thomas Fuller for rector--that learned, loyal, and humorous

divine who, as the inscription on his tomb recorded in his own vein of

wit, sought after immortality while immortalizing the worthies of

England. The Church, with its monuments, is enclosed in the park of

Cranford House, where once stood a Templar preceptory that became a seat

of the Berkeleys, whose old nobility flared into a Georgian scandal now

growing dim. Thus the autobiographical sportsman, Granville Berkeley,

came to be partly brought up here, and has many tales to tell of

highwaymen adventures, including that legend of a Bishop who took to the

road and was “taken ill” on Hounslow Heath, being fatally shot through

the body. This master of hounds could remember the county as dotted with

heaths--Harlington Common, Hillingdon Heath, and others--which at one

time stretched almost continuously down to the Thames, and across it

seemed to piece together the evil repute of Hounslow and Bagshot. But he

lived to lament how “corn-fields have sprung up in lieu of furze-bushes;

villas have filled the swampy gravel-pits where, as a boy, I have shot

snipes; and blooming gardens have banished the bullrushes”; nor will the

_Spectator’s_ young warriors now make havoc among the plovers’ eggs,

which used to be noted spoil on Hounslow Heath.

Another notability of the neighbourhood was Lord Bolingbroke, Pope’s

“noble St. John,” of whose seat, Dawley Court, the name at least is

preserved near Harlington Church. A little off the high-road, to the

right, are the villages of Harlington, and Harmondsworth or Harmsworth,

both with interesting old churches, and the latter boasting the largest

church-barn in England. Between them lie the woods of Sipson. On the

other side, opposite the by-road from Harlington, could once be traced

the outlines of a Roman camp, one of the many connected with Cæsar’s

name. Then at Longford is reached the Colne, hereabout, on the flat

edge of Middlesex, splitting itself into tame branches, harnessed to

industry. Two of these are artificial, one known as the Duke of

Northumberland’s River, the other as the Queen’s, the Cardinal’s, or

sometimes as the Longford River, formed by Wolsey to supply the waters

of Hampton Court. Down the stream keeping the main name, one can find

lanes and footpaths by Stanwell, Runnymede rifle-range, and Staines Moor

to the Thames at Staines; and in favour of this walk it may at least be

said that it implies no hill-climbing. On the Slough road we must hold

on as far as Colnbrook to get out of Middlesex.

The straight road to Staines is of course by the great south-western

highway that forked to the left in Hounslow, keeping parallel to the

South-Western Railway, through a country much given up once to commons,

now to market gardens, which have the name of nursing a not idyllic

class of labourers. The chief places on the railway are Feltham and

Ashford, between which appears to astonished passengers the rigging of a

ship on dry land, planted here to instruct the boys of a large

industrial school; and other institutions help to swell the population

of this vicinity. On the road the most notable spot is Bedfont, its

ancient Church enshrining curious frescoes apparently of Stephen’s

reign, the churchyard famed for two yews trimmed into the likeness of

peacocks, in which a wholesome legend, as interpreted by Tom Hood, sees

two sisters thus transformed as punishment for their vanity.

And where two haughty maidens used to be

In pride of place, where plumy death had trod,

Trailing their gorgeous velvets wantonly,

Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod,

There, gentle stranger, thou mayst only see

Two sombre peacocks.

Another interesting church, with an elaborate Knyvett monument, is in

the pretty village of Stanwell close by, where the spire stands not

quite straight, about a mile to the right of the highroad. Bedfont is

understood to have been the old limit of Windsor Park; and the

neighbourhood has still some fine trees, as well as market-gardens; but

the straight road’s best prospect shows ahead in the Cooper’s Hill ridge

on the edge of Surrey, which it enters by the bridge at Staines.

This border town of three counties may be more pleasantly reached by the

Thames, to whose devious curves the road makes a chord often travelled

by Cobbett on the way to his beloved Surrey and Hampshire; then its

scenery might shape his slander of Middlesex as “all ugly,” while his

detestation of commons provoked him to call Hounslow Heath “a sample of

all that is bad in soil and villainous in look,” yet “only a little

worse than the general run.” It would be the shrinking heaths rather

than the spreading fields that moved him to such sweeping condemnation;

and if his burly ghost still jogs along the Staines road, it might want

nothing but a few acres of “Cobbett’s corn” to take this part of

Middlesex for an earthy paradise.

VIII

THE THAMES BANK

We come now to the south-western corner of Middlesex, presenting a thick

fringe of beauty and interest along the crooked course of the Thames.

The beauty, indeed, is mainly artificial, the ground being in general

flat, traversed by sluggish streams, and often apt to revert to the

condition of a flooded marsh till banked in by dykes of habitation and

ornamentation that make most of this river-edge one line of garden

suburb. When we abuse London for defiling the country, let us not forget

how plain-featured country may be disguised and pranked out under the

fancy-dress of parks, gardens, pleasure-grounds and playgrounds, to be

reckoned among the manufactures of a great city. Here, indeed, a

champaign face of nature smiles rather for Pope and Bolingbroke than for

Wordsworth and Tennyson.

We have already touched the Thames at Brentford, and since inner London

ended with Hammersmith, something might have been said of the green

tongue of Chiswick and the quaint village of Strand-on-the-Green, below

Kew Bridge, only in part overlaid by an extension of suburban

Gunnersbury. Then above Syon Park and Isleworth Church, at one mouth of

the Crane, the villas of St. Margaret’s make a transpontine dependency

of Richmond, almost joined also to the spread of Twickenham. At this

latter town I take up my tale of the riverside.

Twickenham has been growing so fast along its tram-lines that it seems

in danger of becoming a commonplace extension of London; but it cannot

forget days of dignity when Queens, Princes, and poets were at home

here. Katherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr, and Katherine of Braganza are

supposed to have occupied the manor-house that once stood beside the

Church, where lie buried Pope, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Kitty Clive the

actress, and Admiral Byron, that “Foul-weather Jack” whose story of the

_Wager’s_ wreck gave so many hints to his grandson’s verse. Queen Anne,

whose death is such a well-authenticated fact in history, was born at

Twickenham, as was her sister Queen Mary. The only one of Anne’s

seventeen children that struggled on to any prospect of surviving her,

the poor little Duke of Gloucester, was brought from Kensington to

Twickenham, as to the seaside, for change of air after an illness. In

the next century, Horace Walpole speaks of the place as the “Baiae of

Great Britain,” and quotes someone as declaring that “we have more

coaches here than in half France.” Among Pope’s noble neighbours was the

traveller of epistolary renown, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose

friendship with the poet went so sour in the end. Some of the fine

cedars hereabouts are said to have been raised from cones sent by her

from the East. Another householder of rank was that Lord Ferrers, hanged

for murder, according to the legend, in a silk rope, driven to the

gallows in his own coach and six, which nowadays would probably have

taken the road to Broadmoor Asylum. Writers whose works are now in every

gentleman’s library, but not in Mudie’s, such as Richard Owen Cambridge,

who seemed to his contemporaries a universal genius, and that other poet

whose fortune was to be “born a Whitehead and baptized a Paul,” could

once be counted among the notabilities of a place which, under the

shadow of Pope’s renown, has housed more enduring names, from Fielding

to Dickens. But for the long list of its celebrities and associations,

the reader must be referred to such local chronicles as R. S. Cobbett’s

_Memorials of Twickenham_.

Some of the houses thus celebrated still stand, or their names at least

are preserved. Twickenham Park, at the Richmond Bridge end, a seat of

Lord Bacon, has given place to humbler homes. But Marble Hill, built for

the Countess of Suffolk, George II.‘s mistress, and at one time the home

of Mrs. Fitzherbert, another George’s left-handed wife, has been saved

from the jerry-builder to become a public pleasure-ground, that will not

debase the view from Richmond Hill. This house is haunted by the shades

of Pope, Swift, and Gay, as its neighbour by more

[Illustration: HIGH STREET, TWICKENHAM]

recent memories of princely exiles. Orleans House was so renamed as

making an asylum for Louis Philippe, escaped from the storm of the

Revolution which Madame de Genlis had taught him to hail with youthful

enthusiasm. Half a century later, after his second banishment, this

mansion again gave refuge to the Orleans family; then for a time it was

turned into a club. Members of the same family have more than once

occupied the adjacent York House, whose earliest dignity was as home of

Lord Clarendon, by him given to his son-in-law, James II.; and so it

came to be the birthplace of two English Queens. It has now been bought

from the Duke of Orleans by a Parsee gentleman, son of the late Mr. Tata

of Bombay, that millionaire of princely public spirit who lies buried in

the next county.

This connection with our Eastern Empire is not altogether a new one for

York House. A visitor here in his day was the Brahmin reformer Rammohun

Roy, founder of the Brahmo-Somaj church, who is said to have designed

writing a philosophical dialogue with the scene laid on the terrace of

York House. For a good many years towards the end of the century it was

occupied by Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, ex-Governor of Madras, as will

be remembered by all readers of the later extracts from his Diaries,

published in more than a dozen volumes. These volumes, abridged as they

are, have been criticized as too voluminous; but they make excellent

reading for judicious skippers, and after a century or two, one can

imagine a further abridgment being treasured like Evelyn’s Diary or

Horace Walpole’s Letters. This diarist was a keen amateur of good

company and of good stories, which stud his pages like plums in a

pudding of political suet and botanical crumbs. His anecdotes were

collected from all quarters, even from the steps of the throne. There is

one, for instance, of a South African millionaire, whose accent led to

him being addressed in German by a very eminent personage: “_Sind Sie

Baier?_” “Not at present prices, your Majesty!” stammered the confused

courtier. In the same volume we are told how a whist player held

thirteen trumps, yet did not win a trick, for it was in the far West,

and his partner shot him dead as remonstrance against the trumping of

his own ace.

But one must not deck one’s pages with plumes borrowed from a writer

whom I met as fellow-member of two among his many clubs. I can recall a

wet afternoon we killed together shortly before his death, when, to

cheer what seemed a fit of depression, I told him all the stories I

could think of as likely to stir his sense of humour. Only afterwards

did it occur to me, in a flash of _esprit d’escalier_, that I had been

drawing on one of his own lately published volumes; and I shall never

know, on this side of Jordan, whether it were out of courtesy or

obliviousness that the old gentleman let himself appear to be amused.

With one maiden anecdote, however, now for the first time blushing in

print, I had been able to tickle him exceedingly, as it dealt with a

colonial governor, a kind of personage bulking as largely in his

interest as a schoolmaster did for Parson Adams. In the suite of such a

temporary potentate served an officer, whose wife told me how at home,

years later, making a third-class railway journey, they had brought

considerations to bear upon the guard that they should have the

compartment to themselves. But at one station he came to explain: “Very

sorry--train crowded--must put someone in with you--but I have picked

out a respectable couple--quite decent people; you won’t mind

them”--with which apology were bundled in the very decent couple my

friends had last seen viceregally enthroned in a distant clime. So much

for the transitoriness of official glory!

A tale which Grant-Duff might not have thought worth recording has been

told of Mr. Labouchere, but an older date is ascribed to it: that an

Englishman travelling in Germany, called upon to declare his _Stand_,

could describe himself by no other title than “Elector of Middlesex,”

then was astonished to be received with honours due to a prince. Mr.

Labouchere comes to mind here as for a time occupying Pope’s Villa, of

which the name survives, but little else, among the riverside mansions

at the further end of Twickenham. It stands above Eel-pie Island, a

leafy atoll of the Thames, that makes a screen or barrier-reef for this

town, and has at its lower end a ferry not unknown to song.

Pope’s nearest neighbour here was Lord Radnor, whose grounds are now

turned to public enjoyment. A little further on stands back from the

river the park of Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole’s “piecrust

battlements” succeeded Pope’s Villa as lion of the place. The once

famous collection of curiosities, after being dispersed, was in part

regathered into the present mansion, enlarged and improved from that

“Strawberry Hill Gothic” structure that became a proverb, not to say a

by-word, with more tasteful architects. The nucleus of it was “a little

plaything house,” which its dilettante owner, on removing there from his

“tub at Windsor,” described as “the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is

set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges.... Richmond Hill and Ham

Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and

the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all

around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most

poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as

Noah’s when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind.... Lord John

Sackville pre-deceased me here, and instituted certain games called

_cricketalia_, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of

him in a neighbouring meadow.” Still, of a summer evening, such

mysteries are celebrated on the lordly expanse of Twickenham Green; but

if this self-satisfied letter-writer’s ghost could come skimming under

what were once his own windows, Father Noah might find it no harder to

be at home in a toyshop ark than Walpole to recognize the “romance in

lath and plaster” that was his much-advertised work of half a century.

Behind Twickenham, amid more rural surroundings, stands, in a

transformed state, the mansion of Sir Godfrey

[Illustration: THE DIANA FOUNTAIN, BUSHEY PARK]

Kneller the painter, which came to be a training-school for teachers,

with the late Archbishop Temple for one of its principals, but is now

the home of another muse as an academy for army bandsmen, whose

performances are open to the public once a week. Kneller Hall was

originally Whitton House, and not far off, on the south edge of

Hounslow, survives the name of Whitton Park, where bagpipes should once

have been practised; for, in the early part of the eighteenth century,

it was a seat of the Duke of Argyll who in its grounds did so much

towards introducing alien trees, to become naturalized citizens of our

groves and gardens. This was the Duke who served with distinction under

Marlborough and as victor over the Old Pretender’s forces in 1715; while

he may be best remembered as patron of “Jeanie Deans.”

In the famous view beheld by that heroine from Richmond Hill, Twickenham

is seen imperceptibly merging into Teddington, a parish of less fame,

but it, too, has had notable inhabitants, from William Penn the Quaker

to Peg Woffington the actress; and R. D. Blackmore, the novelist of our

own time, practised the moral of Candide in a market-garden here. Both

Upper and Lower Teddington are well populated now, the latter best known

to Londoners for the first full lock on Thames tide-water, the former as

an approach to Bushey Park. This is a royal demesne of over 1,000 acres,

public access to which was secured by a local Hampden, Timothy Bennett,

shoemaker, who in the eighteenth century fought the question of right

of way at his own expense, then, in 1900, was rewarded by a curious

memorial set up at one of the entrances to the park. The last royal

personage who lived here was William IV., as Duke of Clarence; and one

of the last acts of Queen Victoria was granting Bushey House to be a

National Physical Laboratory. The park is now practically a public one,

where a Sunday in May draws throngs of Londoners to admire the flowering

of the chestnuts on its renowned avenue. But “when the high midsummer

pomps are on,” too, and in the glories of autumn decay, and, indeed, at

all seasons, Bushey, with its fine timber, its stretches of bracken, its

ponds, and its herds of tame deer, makes a sight that no visitor to

London should miss. The main avenue, a straight and broad mile, leads

from Teddington to Hampton Court, on the other side approached from

Kingston Bridge through the glades of Hampton Park, to which one could

come round by the river and the villas of Hampton Wick.

The history of this palace is, of course, familiar to every British

schoolboy; but in case any of my readers should be more at home in

Versailles or the Vatican, I will treat them as M. Jourdain desired of

his master. Hampton Court was built by Cardinal Wolsey at the height of

his power and pride, that would have cast into shade the magnificence of

Canons Park, the household of the butcher’s son being nearly ten times

as numerous as that of Queen Anne’s Paymaster-General. Extensive as his

building was, Wolsey appears not to have completed its full design when

his power became endangered by the conflagration lit at Anne Boleyn’s

eyes. He hoped to avert Henry’s wrath by presenting that too ambitious

home to the King, who, in Diomedean exchange, gave him the manor of

Richmond, where soon there were harder dealings between _Ego_ and _Rex

meus_. Henry pulled about the Cardinal’s architecture in his own

high-handed style, building the present hall and chapel; and he made

Hampton a hunting-palace, with several parishes around as preserves.

Edward VI. was born and partly brought up here. Here, too, Mary spent

her dark honeymoon--that unloved sovereign whose faults have been

excused by a schoolgirl on the plea of a temper soured under too many

stepmothers. Hampton was a favourite residence with Elizabeth also, and

with James, who held at it his famous conference of divines, from which

came our present translation of the Bible. Charles I. was much at home

at Hampton, and so in turn was Cromwell--a fact which may have caused

the mental confusion of that schoolboy quotation of him as exclaiming,

“Had I but served my God as I have served my King!” Charles II. and his

brother are found now and then at Hampton, to which William took a

special fancy, so that he had it restored and enlarged by Wren, to be a

home reminding him of Holland by its canals and gardens; and he met his

fatal fall from horseback in the park. Queen Anne’s sickly son, above

mentioned, was born at the palace, where the poet remarks how--

“Thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,

Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.”

The Georges seem rather to have neglected Hampton Court, which in the

last century or so occasionally housed royal guests, but has become

mainly a sort of aristocratic almshouse, the apartments being granted to

widows of distinguished public servants or ladies better born than

endowed. The inmates of these dignified quarters are liable to be

disturbed by the clatter of the adjacent barracks, by an uncertain ghost

of one or other of Henry’s wives, that does not fail to haunt here, and

most of all, perhaps, by the sightseers, who on holidays throng the

quiet courts, the galleries with their thousand pictures, the hall with

its tapestries, the gardens with their gigantic vine, the Long Walk by

the river, the banks of the Long Water in Hampton Park, and the Maze

near the Lion Gate, outside of which the palace is separated from Bushey

Park by a fair-ground of refreshment houses.

The station for Hampton Court is at Molesey, on the Surrey side of the

river, here making a string of shady islets and creeks well known to

boating parties. The tramways from London come to Hampton Green, such a

spacious and well-shaded area as beseems its royal neighbourhood. Along

this, or through the south-west corner of Bushey Park, one can pass on

to the village of Hampton, which touches the river at its rebuilt

Church; but the banks are much blocked by private residences, and soon

disfigured by huge water reservoirs. The most famous house here is

Garrick’s villa, that seems to have been designed as an understudy of

Pope’s. Besides this noble retreat, Garrick had a

[Illustration: HAMPTON COURT PALACE: SOUTH FRONT]

town-house at the Adelphi, and was lord of Hendon Manor; few actors have

managed to be so prudent, so prosperous, and so well off for “the things

that make death terrible,” as was Johnson’s comment on his old pupil’s

display. Sir Christopher Wren retired to a home on Hampton Green, about

which there remain several houses and gardens where wigs and ruffles

would look hardly out of place. New Hampton, to the north, is more

commonplace, where Hampton’s railway-station, on the Shepperton branch,

stands half an hour’s walk from the palace. About as far to the north of

this line is Hanworth, traversed by the artificial Queen’s or Cardinal’s

River formerly mentioned, and once distinguished by a Tudor

hunting-lodge which became the home of Henry VIII.‘s lucky widow.

By its Thames Street, Hampton straggles on towards Sunbury, where the

river is broken by eyots, weirs, and a deep shady cut on the Surrey

side. This village, too, contains good old-fashioned houses as well as

new ones, stretching back from its Church on the bank to the station a

mile behind, where another royal residence is believed to have stood in

Kempton Park, now degraded into a race-course. Close to Sunbury is Upper

Halliford, by which a road takes a straighter line into the neighbouring

parish of Shepperton, cutting across a bend of the river opposite

Walton-on-Thames. Shepperton is a more scattered place, containing

several hamlets and strings of villas connected by roads that seldom

want the true Middlesex wealth of hedgerow timber.

Here at last we seem to be getting into open country, and away from

riverside villas. A summer encampment at the end of Walton Bridge left

out of account, the next place reached on the river is the pretty group

of houses and inns called Lower Halliford, a little above the bridge.

This ford makes the scene of a hot antiquarian controversy as to whether

or no Cæsar here crossed the Thames, fortified against him by the Cowey

Stakes, which some take rather for an ancient fishing weir; and his

point of crossing is variously maintained to have been at Brentford,

Kingston, and Wallingford, while traces and traditions of Roman camps on

either side the river help out the case for Halliford. _Non nostrum

tantas_, etc. An authentic claim to note for Lower Halliford is as the

home of Thomas Love Peacock, an author too little known to the general

reader, though his humorous novels were spread out over nearly half a

century, from the days when he caricatured Shelley and Coleridge,

through the period of Brougham’s patronage of useful knowledge, to that

when competitive examinations gave him a fresh target for ridicule. By

an audience fit, though few, he is not forgotten; and for the sake of

his wit he may be forgiven such thoughtless gibes as that “Scotchmen

would be the best people in the world if there was nobody but themselves

to give them characters.” There is reason to believe, indeed, that even

before his deathbed this audacious writer repented the profanity with

which he bespattered our modern Athens. The plan, at least, of

Peacock’s books was revived for our generation in Mr. Mallock’s _New

Republic_; but Peacock strikes a note of more farcical fun, and his

satire seems seldom less jovial than the song put into the mouth of a

character in _Crotchet Castle_:

After careful meditation

And profound deliberation

On the various petty projects that have just been shown,

Not a scheme in agitation

For the world’s amelioration

Has a grain of common-sense in it, except my own!

Higher up on the bank comes the church core of Shepperton; then

Shepperton Lock is higher still, opposite the Thames end of Weybridge.

The village seems to have shifted its centre of gravity towards the

station and Shepperton Green, which stand further back, but best known

to strangers are the riverside inns and boathouses. To the right of a

road cutting across to Laleham by Shepperton Green lies the small parish

of Littleton, making perhaps the prettiest spot in this district, with

its ancient Church and timbered park, which once enclosed a celebrated

mansion destroyed by fire. This backwater of woodland, shading surely

the tiniest of Britain’s Exe or Esk streams, is pleasantly reached by a

field-path from the end of Chertsey Bridge; then the road by Littleton

goes on to less taking scenes about Feltham or Ashford.

At Shepperton Lock the tow-path crosses from the Surrey side, and

henceforth one can walk along the Middlesex bank, access to which has

hitherto been precarious. Truth to tell, one thus gains little beyond a

prospect of the stream flowing quietly between broad meadows, its bends

making an idle round off the straight road, by which little more than a

mile brings the cyclist from Shepperton to Chertsey Bridge. The green

flats have a beauty of quiet amplitude, which is at least a change after

Richmond’s manifold prospects and the tangled groves of Hampton; and

here a fine background is formed by the pine-bristled heights of Surrey,

edging the arena in which the Wey meets the Thames. William Black’s

rhapsodical pen can make no more of this scenery than “a peaceful

landscape, very English-looking; in the distance there was a low line of

wooded hill, with here and there a church spire appearing among the

trees.” A thunderstorm would get a good stage here, as did Mr. Wells’s

Martian giants when they came stalking across from Byfleet.

Beyond Chertsey Bridge the tow-path is joined by a road that leads on

along the wall of Lord Lucan’s Park to Laleham Ferry, opposite the site

of that once renowned Chertsey Abbey. The pretty village of Laleham,

with its much-patched church, is notable as the home where Dr. Arnold

took pupils in his early life. Matthew Arnold was born here, and is

buried, beside other members of the family, in the churchyard to which

his heart and his father’s always turned fondly.

Love lends life a little grace,

A few sad smiles, and then

Both are laid in one cold place.

The Rugby head master had to wrench himself away from Laleham, where,

indeed, his special admiration was called forth on the Surrey side by

the striking contrast of heath scenery mingling with rich valley lands.

He could no longer rejoice in the bank up to Staines as a walk “which,

though it be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire

loneliness, there being not a house anywhere near it; and the river here

has none of that stir of boats and barges upon it which makes it in many

places as public as the highroad.” Nowadays one must search far up the

Thames for an unstirred reach.

Arnold’s roomy house has vanished, and the quiet amenities of Laleham

seem threatened by architecture of another school, though it stands a

good two miles from either Shepperton or Staines station. But the

builder is hardly needed to populate the river banks in summer, as we

see after crossing the neck of Penton Hook, a most childish vagary of a

mile or so in which hoary Father Thames thinks fit to indulge himself so

far on in his career. This loop, on the Surrey side, is buckled by an

extraordinary gathering of bungalows, house-boats, tents, and shanties

that give airy and watery shelter to an encampment of respectable

gipsies from London, a sort of amphibious picnic life come into favour

in late years. Past this, the tow-path brings us round to the more

permanent riverside quarters of Staines, reached, as usual, less

deviously and pleasantly by a flat, straight road.

Staines is one of the oldest towns in Middlesex, here or hereabouts

appearing to have stood the Roman station _Ad Pontes_, by which the road

to Silchester and Bath crossed the river. The whole vicinity has been

found rich in Roman remains. The original town lies about its parish

church in the valley of the Colne, that works its mills; but the floods

of this sluggish delta have washed a later growth to the east, and it

shows a new red church on the Thames bank, where a terrace of dignity

looks across to the boathouses lining the Surrey side. A meaner quarter

straggles on to the dull flats of Staines Moor behind the railway, from

which High Street curves spaciously down to the bridge, for long the

nearest neighbour of London Bridge. In our great-grandfathers’ day

Staines Bridge was crossed by some three dozen coaches daily; and who

can count the myriad wheels that now make this short straight cut

through Middlesex into Surrey!

Near its bridge stands what is taken for the town’s godfather, London

Stone, marking from times immemorial the limit of the City’s

jurisdiction up the Thames, as ascertained and asserted by repeated

visits of the Lord Mayor and Corporation, which seem now to have fallen

into abeyance. Here I would call up the spirit of Matthew Arnold to

rebuke for me that young lion of the _Daily Telegraph_ who, in

criticizing my book on _Surrey_, growled at its mention of a notable

Lord Mayor’s progress nearly three generations ago as made to Staines,

and not rather to Oxford. For once a critic is wrong: the goal of the

official journey was Staines, the circumgression to Oxford being tacked

on as an after-thought, or piece of by-play. Even thus let me conclude

this chapter with an excursus further up the river, to justify my

accuracy by giving a faithful account of that Thames _Anabasis_ that

might have been forgotten but for the reverend Xenophon--his Lordship’s

chaplain, to wit--who enshrined the record in a leaden volume, now worth

its weight in silver.

The civic fathers, we are told, having resolved to assert the City’s

prerogative at Staines, were tempted by an invitation to connect with

that time-honoured ceremony a pleasure-trip to Oxford. To Oxford, then,

the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress travelled by land, and the first part

of the chronicle is taken up in describing most minutely the

circumstances of this extra jaunt. A whole page goes to the start,

including a description of the coachman’s countenance, “reserved and

thoughtful” as became his important charge, and the “four high-spirited

and stately horses” which, “having been allowed a previous day of

unbroken rest, ... chafed and champed exceedingly on the bits by which

their impetuosity was restrained.” But the murmurs of the admiring crowd

were “at length hushed by the opening of the hall door”; then, “as soon

as the female attendant of the Lady Mayoress had taken her seat, dressed

with becoming neatness, at the side of the well-looking coachman, the

carriage drove away--not, however, with that violent and extreme

rapidity which rather astounds than gratifies the beholders, but at that

steady and majestic pace which is always an indication of real

greatness.” The chaplain, our author, was of the party, though he

modestly keeps himself in a back seat. Thus he can assure us that the

roads were “in excellent order, and that the whole face of creation

gleamed with joy.” It is not every day that creation sees an actual Lord

Mayor faring forth over Middlesex roads.

At Hounslow a powder-mill happened to blow up, as if to salute the

passage of the City potentate; but without further excitement he reached

Oxford, joined there by several Aldermen and officials, who were

forthwith entertained by the local municipality, while “it must here be

mentioned that the Lady Mayoress and other ladies of the party, to the

number of eight, ordered dinner at the ‘Star,’ and spent the evening in

their own society.” But let us pass over a long account of the

illustrious strangers being fêted, lionized and addressed by Town and

Gown, and come to that great day, Thursday, July 27, 1826, when the City

Barge, having taken nearly a week to make the upward voyage, lay in

waiting by the banks of Christ Church meadow, with its ten splendid

scarlet silk banners waving gently in the rising sun, beside the shallop

of the Thames Navigation Committee and another large boat, in which came

his lordship’s Yeomen of the Household, together with that most

important functionary the cook, “who was at the time of embarkation

busily engaged in preparing a fire in a grate fixed in the bow of the

boat.” So at last, “amidst shouts of reiterated applause from the

surrounding multitudes, the City Barge, manned by the City watermen in

scarlet liveries, and all the other boats in attendance on his lordship,

were simultaneously launched on the broad bosom of the princely

Thames”--a sight not to be seen by this degenerate age unless on the

front page of its _Illustrated London News_.

Punch was not such a rare show in the country as a live Lord Mayor.

Crowds of people on the tow-path escorted the procession from Oxford;

then every town and village near the banks furnished a new contingent of

eager spectators. “Distant shouts of acclamation perpetually re-echoed

from field to field, as the various rustic parties, with their fresh and

blooming faces, were seen hurrying forth from their cottages and

gardens, climbing trees, struggling through copses, and traversing

thickets to make their shortest way to the water side.” No wonder the

children ran, for the Lord Mayor and Mr. Alderman Atkins scattered

handfuls of half-pence from their stately craft. At Caversham the

condescension of true greatness was still more markedly exhibited in a

moving incident recorded with long-drawn waggery, the gist of it being

the picking out of a most uncouth and ludicrous-looking rustic mounted

upon a “gaunt and rusty pony,” whom, flinging him a piece of money, his

Lordship overwhelmed with the honour of a commission to ride on to

Reading as his _avant-courier_.

Having started from Oxford at seven, the convoy reached Reading when

“the sun had whirled down his broad disk into the west; and the evening

twilight just served to show obscurely the tranquil stream of water over

which the vessel glided, and the shapeless forms of country by which it

was surrounded.” Here the voyagers spent the night at the “Bear Inn,”

re-embarking next morning amid the ringing of bells and the firing of

guns, not to speak of a band of music now taken on board. They dined at

Clieveden, which prompts the author to a homily on the shortcomings of

Dryden’s Buckingham, balanced by a seven-page eulogium on the virtues of

the late George III. The local gentry and officials did not fail to pay

their respects to the passing Admiral of the Thames, and were invited on

board “with all the usual forms of politeness.” As we have seen, the

distinguished tourists occasionally indulged themselves in mild

jocosity; but on the whole their mood was one of becoming admiration,

and their chaplain can assure us that “no recourse was had in any single

instance throughout the voyage either to cards or dice, or to any other

of those frivolous expedients to which the evening hours of life are

sacrificed.”

The next night was spent at Windsor, where some score of pages go to

celebrate the Castle apartments in a true “God bless the Regent and the

Duke of York!” spirit of British loyalty. Delayed till noon by

sight-seeing, the procession then got afloat for Staines, and whereas,

above Windsor, the state barge had almost stuck in the mud, it now made

better way in deeper water, and “left a long, undulating track behind”

as it passed beneath that royal abode, “lifting up its lordly pile as if

to receive the prostrate homage of the surrounding country.”

Hitherto the voyage had been more of a pleasure jaunt, but at Staines

came to be enacted the real business of this Lord Mayor’s show _in

partibus_. Duly arrayed in their robes and emblems of office, to the

music of national airs, amid multitudes of the surrounding inhabitants,

our City fathers descended to the shore, and three times solemnly

circumambulated their western landmark--let us trust in true course of

the sun, though on that pagan feature of the rite its reverend

chronicler is not explicit.

When the procession halted, the Lord Mayor took his station near

the City Boundary; and directed the City Sword to be placed on the

Stone, in token of his Lordship’s jurisdiction. It was also a part

of the ceremony--which, though important, is simple--that the City

Banner should wave over the Stone. At the request, therefore, of

the Lord Mayor, Lord Henry Beauclerk, a lad of very prepossessing

appearance, of the age of fourteen, dressed in naval uniform, and

brother to His Grace the Duke of St. Albans, mounted the Stone, and

held the City Banner during the performance of the ceremony. The

Lord Mayor now received a bottle of wine from one of the

attendants, and broke it, according to ancient custom, on the

Stone. The Water-Bailiff then handed his Lordship a glass of wine,

who drank, ‘May God preserve the City of London!’ In this he was

joined by the young nobleman and the assembled company. Orders were

then given that the following inscription should be engraven on the

pedestal which supported the Stone:

“The Right Honourable

WILLIAM VENABLES,

Lord Mayor of the City of London

and

Conservator of the River Thames,

Viewed the Western Boundary of the

City’s Jurisdiction on the said River,

Marked by the Ancient Stone

Raised upon this Pedestal,

Erected A.D. 1285,

On the 29th day of July, A.D. 1826.

_God preserve the City of London!_”

The Lord Mayor then scattered abroad some hundred newly-coined

sixpences, and after repeated cheering, returned on board the

barge.

We need not be surprised to hear that “at three o’clock the party sat

down in the cabin of the State Barge to a cold collation; after which

some speeches were made.” By half-past eight they landed at Richmond,

where the carriages were in waiting, and the sunburned Gilpins “returned

to their respective homes.” His lordship, it is recorded, reached the

Mansion House “a few minutes before ten” on this Saturday night; but

future ages are left to guess at what hour he went to bed. The worthy

chaplain, long laid to deeper rest, would surely turn in his grave could

he know how he had taken pains to put in a ludicrous light that truly

august Corporation, worshipful up and down the river for a hundred

miles, though its practical power be now in the farther-reaching hands

of the Thames Conservancy.

[Illustration: KEW BRIDGE FROM BRENTFORD]

IX

BEATING THE BOUNDS

Like that corporation party, both writer and reader might now go home,

having reached the limit of their companionship. But one more ramble we

may take, if not tired of each other. We have viewed Middlesex from its

most familiar eminence, and we have radiated through it by its highroads

from London. There remains to bind up our short wayfarings by

perambulating the bounds of this little county, as some future Lord

Mayor may be able to do from his state-balloon.

A barge will not serve us all the way here so well as a broomstick. On

three sides Middlesex is enclosed by natural boundaries--the Thames on

the south, the Lea on the east, and the Colne on the west. It is on the

north side that the frontier becomes an arbitrary one, and, in fact,

presents such a jagged outline as sometimes to suggest that whoever

shore off this division of England must have been staggering from one

tap of strong ale or mead to the next in any direction. A more

creditable explanation refers such irregularity to spiritual rather than

spirituous influences, the lands of two bishops, we are told, having

thus dovetailed into each other in the days when bishops had power to

bind and loose on earth. Here it must be no trivial sport to beat the

parish bounds--on the outside coincident with those of the county--as to

which the oldest inhabitant could perhaps tell us how they were

literally beaten into his memory in boyhood by blows or stripes

administered at this or that spot, a custom that still may linger in

playful survivals. What the oldest inhabitant will not know is that the

rough custom of his youth seems to have been an attenuated form of

bloodier sacrifices, which went more than skin deep in the propitiation

of invisible spirits of term and boundary.

Something of the same irregularity, indeed, we find on beginning to

trace the Middlesex bounds from Staines, above which they wander for a

few miles as if confused among the delta of branches in which the Colne

reaches the Thames. The main stream, to which Ordnance Survey maps grant

the title, is that one crawling into Staines by the east side of the

Great Northern Railway branch from Uxbridge. Here the boundary has bent

a mile or two westwards, at one point touching the Colne Brook, as the

branch is called that, from the village of this name, straggles down to

the Thames opposite Egham. A pool in the Thames used to bear the

nickname of “Colnbrook Churchyard,” the point of the grim jest being

that this frontier village had no churchyard, and that the robbers who

infested the surrounding moors were in the way of flinging the bodies of

their victims into the river. “Moorish” is Spenser’s epithet for the

Colne, moor in this part of Britain having commonly implied marshy

rather than heathy ground; and behind Staines we get on an unlovely

river flat still bearing the name of Staines Moor. But if we incline to

hurry away from the Colne as sluggish and defiled by industries, let us

remember how dear its waters were to Milton, whose home in youth was at

Horton on the Bucks side, whence he had choice of wanderings among

“Meadows trim with daisies pied,

Shallow brooks and river wide.”

From Colnbrook the boundary bends back towards the Colne River, with

which it presently falls in along the reach from Yiewsley to Uxbridge,

where this stream skirmishes out on the western flank of the canal’s

straighter march. On the Middlesex side, here, the world is too much

with us, and we must not be tempted over to the woods and heaths of

Iver, in Bucks. So let us hasten up the canal bank to Uxbridge, where

the border takes a crook to the east along a stream known as the Shire

Ditch, then, recrossing the canal, once more follows the river as far as

the county’s north-western corner.

This upper half of the western boundary is more picturesque than the

flats below. Now the Colne runs through a real valley, shut in to the

east by a ridge of high ground, looking over to the Bucks village of

Denham, and other spots known to artists as well as to anglers. The

ridge itself, which a road mounts by the shrunken bounds of Uxbridge

Common, has several points both of beauty and interest. Over it for

nearly half a dozen miles extends the name of Harefield, associated with

that of the Newdigate family, which has such a good chance of fame

through their annual _vates sacer_ at Oxford. One of them chose an “Adam

Bede” for land agent, whose daughter would widely renown, under an

_alias_, their Warwickshire seat, at which George Eliot had glimpses of

squirely life. Another of the Newdigates was well known to our

grandfathers as a Parliamentary Protestant champion. Their modern

mansion, Harefield Place, comes a couple of miles above Uxbridge, built

here to replace the old house, two or three miles further on, that had

been destroyed by fire. This was the seat of the Countess of Derby for

whom Milton wrote his Arcades, and whose tomb is the most sumptuous of

those ornamenting Harefield Church.

On the wooded bank behind the church the site of that defunct home is

picturesquely marked by a group of ponds and grand old trees. By what

seems to have been once an avenue, a path slopes on up the bank to

Breakspear, a still flourishing mansion, beautifully embowered, notable

because this manor is said to have belonged to the family of the one

English Pope, Adrian IV. Some few years ago, when a Catholic chapel was

being consecrated in the neighbourhood, the mason brought duly to wall

up the relics in its altar turned out to bear the name of Nicholas

Breakspear. At a social function which followed there was naturally some

talk of such a coincidence, and an inconsiderate Catholic suggested

that the man must be a descendant of his great namesake. “Don’t be

taking away a Pope’s character!” cried one jovial Irish priest; to which

another made response: “Faith! and it’s no character he had to lose

after selling us to the English.” This Pope, who gave Henry II. a title

to Ireland in consideration of the payment of Peter’s pence, has been

also claimed as a Hertford man; but if Breakspear were his cradle, it

stands a good mile within the Middlesex border, about as far to the west

of Ruislip reservoir.

Harefield Church, with its show of monuments, lies below its village,

beyond which, on the road to Rickmansworth, we come to Harefield Park

and Harefield Grove, or, descending into the river valley, we should

find a Harefield Moor and a Harefield Wharf on the canal. Harefield is

as yet a real country village with quiet inns and roomy green, but

ominous placards hold out a threat of “villa residences.” Nothing,

indeed, could at present be more unsuburban than the byroad which, at

the school-house, turns off along Harefield Park and by the hamlet of

Hillend, to wind shadily with westward bends till it drops steeply to

the canal, where a huge quarry has uncovered a chalk bank contrasting

with variegated disclosures. For at this corner, as at one other,

Middlesex shows its age in gouty knuckles of chalk as well as wrinkles

of sand.

To reach the extreme north-western nook of the county we must now leave

the ridge, to hold for a mile across the flat on which, alongside that

cart-horse canal, the Colne goes frisking and sliding in wayward

channels, by whose clear shallows the Miltons of to-day must beware how

they come angling after poetic images, as these are preserves for the

“True Waltonians” of Rickmansworth. At the ford on the further branch,

near the village of Mill End, we reach the border-line, which has been

kept in view west of the parallel ridge; but now it turns eastward,

making a dip to the south as it crosses the river flat, then soon

mounting to green bastions moated by the canal.

On this northern side it is that we may find it hard to know at any

point whether we are in Middlesex or in Herts. The line runs over high

ground a couple of miles south of Rickmansworth, passing between

Harefield Grove and Bishop’s Wood, then turning north along the road to

Batchworth Heath, that brings us past a large new consumptive hospital,

testimony to the airiness of this plateau, more than 300 feet above the

sea. The woods on either hand, with their sand-banks and pine-clumps,

are jealously fortified by wire and placards; but part of the heath is

still open, where we come to the gates of Moor Park, looking over such a

fine view southward and eastward. The border-line here passes through

the garden of the “Prince of Wales,” crosses the highroad mounting up

from Northwood, then for a little is roughly represented by the byroad

which drops from the Moor Park gates, making towards a height crowned by

the Oxhey Woods; but soon it bends back from this road, and to touch it

again we must take a path along the Metropolitan line, beside which we

should find it marked by a funereal obelisk, that seems a monument to

the rural charms of Northwood, here bleeding to death in red-brick

villas. A more prosaic explanation of such landmarks is as showing the

limits of the Port of London coal-tax, abolished in our time; but, like

the Father of History, I repeat this as told me, not as matter of faith.

From Northwood the border runs on to the bottom of the Oxhey woods,

thence trending northwards across the London and North Western line a

mile beyond Pinner Station, and keeping a little to the west of Grim’s

Dyke, as it mounts on to Harrow Weald Common, and from that to the

highest point of Middlesex at the edge of Bushey Heath. Its course now

is on the north-west side of Stanmore Common, to touch the Aldenham

reservoir, whence it ascends to Elstree, over a sweep of high ground

giving fine glimpses on either side, though I cannot make out from what

point, hereabouts, Defoe could have had the extensive prospect which set

his foreign companions exclaiming that England was all a garden.

They had there on the right Hand, the Town of St. _Albans_ in their

View; and all the Spaces between, and further beyond it, look’d

indeed like a Garden. The enclos’d Corn-Fields made one grand

Parterre, the thick planted Hedge Rows, like a Wilderness or

Labyrinth, divided in _Espaliers_, the Villages interspers’d,

look’d like so many several Noble Seats of Gentlemen at a Distance.

In a Word it was all Nature, and yet look’d all like Art; on the

left Hand we see the West-End of _London_, _Westminster-Abbey_ and

the _Parliament-House_, but the Body of the City was cut off by the

Hill, at which _Hampstead_ intercepted the Sight on that side. More

to the South we had _Hampton Court_ and S. W. _Windsor_, and

between both, all those most Beautiful Parts of _Middlesex_ and

_Surrey_, on the Bank of the Thames, of which I have already said

so much.

From Elstree the border-line closely follows the road to Barnet as far

as the hamlet of Barnet Gate, where it turns south-east for its most

extraordinary vagaries. Holding straight on by the road north-eastward,

in little more than a mile we should strike it again across the mouth of

that inlet, miles deep, by which Herts flows into Middlesex about the

Great North Road. A little below Barnet Gate the line bends southward

towards Highwood, then again eastward in the dip between Totteridge and

Mill Hill, so as to bring the former ridge into Herts. On the road

mounting it, the boundary is marked by a half-buried post, economically

abbreviating our county’s style as D.D.X. I stray only some few hundred

yards from my diocese in pointing out the beautiful walk along this

ridge--a long mile of broad-swarded road, or stretched-out common,

bordered by ponds, farms, cottage gardens and trees, through which one

gets fine glimpses of Barnet to the north and Mill Hill to the south.

Then comes the village and its Church, opposite which Copped Hall was at

one time occupied by Bulwer Lytton; Cardinal Manning, Richard Baxter,

and Lady Rachael Russell being other names connected with this pretty

place, only a little blighted as yet by the suburban builder. Further

on, at the “Orange Tree,” opens the cottage-bordered green, an unusually

long one, from the foot of which run most rustic paths that would soon

bring us back into Middlesex, as does Totteridge Lane, holding eastward

across the Barnet line to Whetstone.

For here the eccentric boundary, after attaining its “furthest south”

near Woodside Park station, has taken another bend north beside the

Dollis Brook, so as to stretch out a tongue of Middlesex for some two

miles along the Great North Road, across which it strikes, then again

turns south by the Great Northern Railway, till it ends its maddest

deviation in this direction near Colney Hatch Asylum, only about eight

miles from the Thames. Crossing the railway beyond New Southgate

station, and walking on eastwards to the next cross roads, one reaches

the invisible head of this crook in a field still open to the north. The

boundary stones having disappeared, the exact run of the line, by a few

feet, is at present in question, a dispute of some consequence upon

ground now “ripe” for the builder, since building regulations differ in

the two counties.

Now, as if scared from the thickening suburbs, it turns back north to

enclose Southgate and Winchmore Hill in Middlesex, leaving the Barnets

in Herts with the valley of the Pymmes Brook, here tripping like a

younker and a prodigal, yet after a few miles more to creep so lamely

into the Lea over Tottenham Marshes. At Cock Fosters the wilful line

takes a westward course along Hadley Common, at the further end of which

it wanders round the outskirts of High Barnet, so as to fall in again

with the road from Elstree; but soon it starts off on a fresh northward

tack along the county’s north-eastern headland. It would now seem to be

tired of freakish tricks, and in the woods below North Mimms it bends

eastward to run pretty steadily on between Potter’s Bar and Northaw,

beside the first stage of the road to Enfield, then a little to the

north of White Webbs Park, by the south side of Theobald’s Park, across

the New River and the high-road entering Waltham Cross, a mile beyond

which it is brought up with a round turn by the Lea.

The sluggish crooks of the Lea make the county’s eastern boundary. But

alas for that once idyllic river, loved and lost by gentle piscators!

Amateurs of Dutch scenery might here and there find a bit to their

taste; and the Essex bank has heights that show to more advantage over

Middlesex flats, where one sees how this lower course of the Lea has

been fouled into a dull Lethe, suggesting few poetical images, unless

those of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the dark tower came.” Its meadows,

on which nowadays one will hardly find a “milkmaid singing like a

nightingale,” or “young Corydon, the shepherd, playing purely on his

oaten pipe,” are more fitly described as marshes; and the wandering and

branching stream is drained into the Lea Navigation, in part coinciding

with the river’s course, but more often holding aloof from it like a

prosperous and prosaic citizen from some ne’er-do-well idler of the

family.

Not that it is altogether idle, indeed, for as it creeps and twists to

its slimy mouth behind the forlorn Isle of Dogs, “the wanton Lea” has

been pressed into the service of London’s water-supply, stored and well

filtered, let us hope. Reservoir embankments ill adorn the river

scenery; nor does a new pea-green swimming-bath excite such curiosity as

did a towering pile of faggots or brushwood, once used as rifle-butts,

that made a landmark of Tottenham Marshes till the other day it lit them

up in its moment of glory as a gigantic bonfire. The cheerfullest sight

here is the football scrimmages of would-be Hotspurs, played on gateless

flats. The creeks and channels of the river-bed are still frequented by

local Izaak Waltons, in whose breasts springs eternal hope of roach or

dace. Very hot weather tempts venturesome youth to bathe in the Stygian

stream. The sophisticated main channel is ploughed by crews of athletic

East Enders who have little need to be admonished, “Eyes in the boat!”

This river was once capable of more serious navigation, if we may trust

the legend that a fleet of Danes sailed up it for twenty miles, settling

themselves in a camp from which Alfred diverted the stream, and set on

the bold Londoners to make havoc of that stranded fleet, so that, in

Drayton’s verse, “old Lea brags of the Danish blood.”

We are here skirting close to the high-road by which we came out through

Edmonton. “But I now see Tottenham Cross, and our short walk hither

shall put a period to my too long discourse.” It is as well we are not

bound to enter the County of London, since there the Lea would bring us

to Hackney Marsh, perhaps the most unlovely spot of Middlesex soil--one

which some examiners, indeed, might propose to bracket with Staines

Moor, that at least deserves a _proxime accessit_.

Such blotches, however, are exceptional, and between those dismal flats

on the most distant edges of the county so recklessly libelled as “all

ugly,” it has been shown how one can find much pleasant and not a little

charming scenery of a truly English type. If a jury of my

fellow-countymen and gentle readers be not now ready to give a verdict

of slander against Cobbett, let them go forth to examine with their own

eyes the evidence on which I have been able faithfully to discharge my

duty as advocate for Middlesex.

“To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new!”

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

[Illustration: MAP ACCOMPANYING “MIDDLESEX.” PAINTED BY JOHN FULLEYLOVE,

R.I. DESCRIBED]

[Illustration: A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF. PUBLISHED BY A. AND C. BLACK,

LONDON.]

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

the the Alexandra Palace=> the Alexandra Palace {pg 44}

cotninuing the Green Lanes=> continuing the Green Lanes {pg 71}

surburban avenues=> suburban avenues {pg 106}