_NORTH END._
When Leigh Hunt wrote of Hampstead that it ‘was a village revelling in
varieties,’ he summarised in a sentence its chief characteristic and
charm.
Behind the High Street, to the right, there lies a labyrinth of lanes,
passages, courts, roads, groves, and squares. The map of the place shows
its complications, and the irresponsibility of the builders. Houses
seem to have been run up without design or order; a so-called road ends
in a cul-de-sac, a square is represented by a malformed triangle, the
groves are without trees. Good old houses assert themselves on high
places, and mean ones crowd the ways leading up to them. All shows the
extemporary mode of building locally prevalent at the time, in which no
fixed plan appears; it is the old copyhold mode of temporary convenience
consolidated into brick. But variety meets you everywhere. Nature herself
aids it in the formation of the ground—the mounts and interposing
undulations. Trees are seen here and there, and bits of primitive waste
appear in quite unexpected places.
Queer old houses nestle in trellis-work and creepers, interned within
high garden walls, and a little compact settlement of them tops the
Mount, the altitude of which shows that of the highway to the Heath when
Oliver Goldsmith, his heart still true to the memory of ‘Sweet Lissoy,’
climbed it on summer Sunday mornings, and wrote afterwards of the
view from Hampstead Hill that ‘Nature never exhibited a more beautiful
prospect.’ This was in 1756-57, and the road was not cut through till
1763; so that from its summit, as was said by some old author of Highgate
Hill, one trod upon the top of St. Paul’s. And it may be that the
solitudes of the upper Heath, with its hawthorn-thickets, its broken
ground and gravelly hollows, or the stillness of the rustic lanes in
its vicinity, may have proved as propitious to his Muse as they did in
later times to those of Keats and Shelley. At all events, to breathe the
air upon its heights must have made him who was brimful of the love of
Nature feel as the gods felt when respiring that of Olympus—sublimely
indifferent to mundane matters. Then the garrulous, flighty talker grew
serene: he ‘communed with his own heart, and was still.’
[Illustration: _Goldsmith._]
Here, possibly, some portions of the ‘Traveller’ may have been thought
out, that poem which modified for Miss Reynolds the ugliness of the
sallow, melancholy-looking man with heavy, protuberant forehead, and grim
frown between the brows, the result of thought which not even his friends
gave him credit for, but whose ‘ill-natured eyes,’ as he himself calls
them, grew tender with compassion at the sight of want and sorrow.[160]
It was another thing when, ceasing to be a mere Grub Street hack, he
moved to Wine Office Court, and gave suppers, and came hither for a
‘shoemaker’s holiday,’ as he expressed it, with his ‘Jolly Pigeon’
friends. But at the period I am now writing of, Goldsmith was correcting
the press for Mr. Samuel Richardson, the literary bookseller of Salisbury
Court, whose epistolary novels, as we know, had taken the town by storm,
and who himself frequently figured in the shady Hampstead Well walk, as
also at Tunbridge Wells, where Loggan, the dwarf,[161] had included him
amongst others of our Hampstead celebrities who frequented that pleasant
sanatorium: Old Colley Cibber, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, Garrick, and Mrs.
Fraisi, the singer, whose fine, expansive person and expensive dress made
an important appearance in the walks.
Then the trees, or groups of them, the ponds, the little dells, the
piquant ‘come and see what I can show you’ eminences! The old, solid, red
or brown brick mansions; that speak of ‘successful commercial enterprise,
and its sequel of splendid wealth.’
And, better still, in the shadow of an old lane, an early Georgian house
of ruddy brick, unfaded by centuries of storm and sunshine, with a white
gallery running round it like a ruff, and a lovely oriel looking to the
sunsets.[162] Then the avenues that have some way got adrift from the
homes they once led to, and are left stranded on the Heath, and the
sweet, tree-shaded lanes; but these are, alas! for the most part lost to
us, like the woods, the site of a once-great gathering of them, that had
a history before the Conquest, though the history is lost to us, like the
concluding chapters of Livy.
The oldest inhabitant of Hampstead will tell you that he does not know
the whole of it, and a workman once informed the writer that he had daily
crossed the Heath to his employment for many years, but he believed that
he had scarcely ever found his way across it or back by precisely the
same path. Undoubtedly, Hampstead has the merit of infinite variety, and
the charm of compelling those who know it to desire a return to it with
great longing. Even the separate districts into which it is now nominally
divided have a distinctive character of their own, and West End is no
more like Frognal than South End is like North End or Church Row.
[Illustration: _North End from the Heath._]
North End is easily accessible from any part of the Heath, but if one
happens to come out on the Spaniards Road, it is worth while pausing to
admire the pleasing effect of the slender spire of Christ Church, showing
almost everywhere above the trees that appear massed about it on Squire’s
Mount, and everywhere harmonizing with the view. We have the east Heath
to the right, with the Vale of Health lying in a green hollow below the
Broad Walk, which divides the upper from the lower Heath; and passing the
destroyed site of the ‘Nine Elms’ in a dell on the same side of the way,
the roof of a grange-like dwelling, noticeable in my time for a bell or
clock turret on the stable buildings, peeping through the surrounding
foliage. If I remember aright, Mrs. Hodgson then lived there. Bordering
the road for some distance we have, or had, the holly-hedge, said to have
been wholly the work of Lord Erskine.
Turning back at the Spaniards, we can either take the Sandy Road, as it
is locally called, which shows like a terrace path between the pines upon
the side of the hill; or, going on past Heath House and Jack Straw’s
Castle, make a landmark of one of the Heath-keeper’s red-brick lodges,
and steer a course at an angle that will bring us out close to Wildwood
Avenue, and pretty low down on the North End Road.
By the first route we pass some charmingly-situated houses on the upper
ridge of the Heath, looking towards the south-west, and with their
back-fronts, if I may so call them, to the road. Closed in by high walls,
the passers-by see nothing of the beauty of the grounds by which they are
surrounded, so that by making a slant across the Heath we lose nothing
of interest or beauty. Our path brings us out nearly opposite the gates
of Cedar Lawn, and not far from Hill House, or The Hill, as it was more
generally called, the beautiful home till quite recently of Francis
Hoare, Esq. The place was celebrated for its lovely grounds and gardens.
In 1895 Mr. Francis Hoare removed to a house in Kensington, and Hill
House, that for the best part of a century had been the home of one or
other of the Hoare family, now nearly rebuilt, is the residence of Mr.
Fisher. It was probably built in George I.’s reign, but had been several
times altered and added to. In 1811 Abrahams mentions the house ‘with new
buildings,’ and it had no doubt suffered since from modern improvements.
[Illustration: _Fenton House, 1780._]
The Hill, like the older home of the family at the Heath, had been
distinguished as a centre of intellectual life, of active religious
thought, and practical philanthropy. Here Wilberforce and Sir Thomas
Fowell Buxton discussed their scheme for the suppression of that
long-existing blot upon the Christianity and civilization of England, the
dreadful slave-trade, and the ever-to-be-honoured Elizabeth Fry found
abundant sympathy in her labour of love for the hitherto uncared-for
female criminals in Newgate and other prisons. A letter from Lucy Aikin
to her niece, November, no date of day or year, but probably in 1826,
gives a glimpse of a social evening at Hill House:
‘Yesterday I dined at the S. Hoares’; enjoyed it much. There was no
great party, but all were kind and friendly, and we talked of the days
of our youth. Mr. Crabbe came in the evening, and we made him tell us of
Johnson, whom he had met with Burke at the house of the Reynolds. Then we
spoke of modern poets, Burns and Montgomery.’
She calls Mrs. Inchbald a charming writer, and says that Miss Edgeworth
has just come to town. In October, 1826, she writes that Hampstead is
almost a desert, ‘the Earls away, Mrs. Greaves away, the Misses Baillie
not expected till to-morrow.’[163]
In Augustus Hare’s ‘Memorials of the Gurneys of Earlham,’ we get another
peep of society at Hill House in 1830, in a letter of J. G. Gurney, who
there first met Dr. Chalmers:
‘I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Chalmers at Hill House, Hampstead.
We walked in the garden ... at dinner an interesting party. Sumner,
Bishop of Chester, Dr. Lushington, Buxton (Sir Fowell), and my sister,
Elizabeth Fry.[164] In the evening Joanna Baillie joined our party. Next
morning my brother Samuel Hoare took Dr. Chalmers and me to Wilberforce’s
at Highwood, beyond Hendon (Mill Hill). Our morning passed delightfully;
a stream of conversation flowed between ourselves and the ever-lively
Wilberforce. I have seldom observed a more amazing contrast than between
Chalmers and Wilberforce. Chalmers is stout and erect; Wilberforce minute
and singularly twisted. Chalmers, both in body and mind, moves with a
deliberate step; Wilberforce flies about with astonishing activity,
while his mind flits from object to object with astonishing versatility.
Chalmers is like a good-tempered lion; Wilberforce like a bee, and,
except when fairly asleep, is never latent.’
These extracts afford an interesting glance at persons and associations
connected with the Hoare family and Hill House. Earlier in the century we
might have met Hannah More, Young of the ‘Night Thoughts,’ Mrs. Barbauld,
and subsequently the banker-poet, Rogers, Coleridge and many more of the
fraternity of letters.
To the right of Hill House lay a little bit of wooded ground, part of the
original Wildwood Grove,[165] through which a path running diagonally
from the road led into one of the avenues for which Hampstead is
remarkable, avenues that, like Coleridge’s discourses, to those who could
not understand them, ‘start from no premises, and arrive at no definite
conclusion,’ though houses have occasionally been adapted to them, like
Flitcroft’s Villa, at the end of the fine grove of lime-trees between
Branch Hill and Frognal. Wildwood Avenue, as it is called, consists of a
row of horse-chestnut-trees on one side, and a stately file of limes on
the other. These, with their widely-spreading branches, through which the
breeze sends restless lights and shadows, in contrast with the stronger
forms and picturesquely-slanting trunks of the horse-chestnuts, which in
some instances have taken a half-spiral direction in their efforts to
strengthen themselves against the storms of many winters, have been a joy
to successive generations of artists and unnumbered lovers of Nature.
Wildwood Avenue passes the entrance to North End House,[166] to which I
am informed it originally led, and the trees go off by twos and threes
upon a little triangular bit of greensward opposite to what used to be,
perhaps is still, Wildwood Cottage, a plain, white, weather-boarded
house, with red-tiled roof, a rustic rose-covered porch, and with a
triplet of limes before it. Of this house there is something more to be
said further on.
In coming down the avenue we pass on the right hand a paddock belonging
to Mr. Gurney Hoare, where in bygone years stood a walnut-tree,[167] to
the fruit of which by immemorial custom all the copyholders of Hampstead
had a right, a privilege, I am told, that the boys used to take good care
should not lapse for want of being annually maintained.
Returning to the road at the end of the wall enclosing the grounds of
Hill House, we come out upon a bit of the Heath, with a straggling group
of dark-stemmed, storm-stricken fir-trees at its farthest end, near the
wall of Heath Lodge, locally known as the Eleven Sisters. Beneath the
footpath on the edge of the Heath the main road is continued along a deep
cutting past the back-front of North End House, now called Wildwood,
a name to which, Mr. Howitt thinks, it had the original right. This
cutting, said to be some centuries old, runs parallel with the gardens
and grounds of North End House,[168] a name under which the place retains
reminiscences of the saddest chapter in the life of England’s great
statesman, Pitt, Earl of Chatham, which it would have been well for the
interest of Hampstead to have retained. The house stands on a descending
tongue of ground, running down, as we have said, between the old avenue
and the North End Road, and is embowered in finely-grown trees. The
garden runs up the ascent, and has an old, octagonal summer house of
three stories at the upper end of it, which can be seen from the footpath
on the Heath. This is still in a fair state of preservation.
[Illustration: _Firs._]
The house—as old as the early Georgian period—has been altered and raised
a story since it was held, probably on lease, by Lord North. It was
during his tenancy that his famous brother-in-law, Lord Chatham, when
suffering from the agonies of gout, and sometimes, it has been suspected,
when only making them a pretext to escape from political vexations and
perplexities, was wont to resort thither, sometimes coming all the way
from Richmond to find a night’s rest at North End. Lord Mahon, in his
‘History of England,’ gives copies of letters written by the great
Minister from this retreat. From one of these we find he was at North
End, Hampstead, on Saturday, August 23, 1766, immediately after he became
Prime Minister; whilst his last visit here, according to the author of
the ‘Northern Heights of London,’ took place some time after March, 1778
(that would be very shortly before his death, which occurred May 11 of
that year).
I hope I am not quoting someone else in applying to him that line,
‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied,’[169] but his conduct
and eccentricities at times came very near it. He had such a dread of
neighbours that he bought up all the houses near his own to ensure his
having none. His terror of loud noises and of strangers was excessive,
and if in his solitary walks he saw another person on the path
approaching him, he would run round corners or down side-paths to avoid a
meeting. Even when driving for exercise on the Heath, the blinds of the
carriage were close drawn, so that no one might see him.
It cannot be said that in age his looks were in his favour. He was dark,
even to swarthiness, with a large hooked nose, and eyes with which ‘he
glared at his antagonists, and a scowl with which he overawed them.’
Walpole says he had a black beard which, when suffering with gout, he
would leave unshaven for days. But a modern writer, while leaving his
portrait intact, transfuses it with genius, and says that ‘with his eagle
aspect, and eyes that would blaze a cannon, he commanded the little
things that listened to his voice as might an Emperor his legionaries.’
‘I should not mind what he says,’ exclaimed Lord Holland to his wife;
‘but his eyes!’
There is no doubt that either from physical suffering or mental anxiety
he was at times the victim of great prostration and nervous irritability.
It may be that at these periods the seclusion and quiet of North End
House, with the wooded beauty and fine air of the neighbourhood, may have
proved to him in effect what fine music was to the mind of Emerson, at
once assuasive and refreshing.
It is probable, too, that these seasons of retirement, in which he
withdrew himself even from his family, shutting himself up in a small
room, which, with the oriel window belonging to it, was for many
years _properly left unaltered_, enabled him to abstract himself from
everything but the political problems of the day, and to map out in
his masterful mind the means of coping with difficulties, if not of
subjugating them wholly. Mr. Howitt gives the following description of
the ‘closet, or room,’ in which Lord Chatham voluntarily imprisoned
himself, at which times not even the servant who waited on him was
permitted to see him:[170]
‘The opening in the wall from the staircase to the room still remains
through which the unhappy man received his meals, or anything else
conveyed to him. It is an opening of perhaps 18 inches square, having a
door on each side of the wall; the door within had a padlock, which still
hangs upon it. When anything was conveyed to him, a knock was made on the
outer door, and the articles placed in the recess. When the outer door
again closed, the invalid opened the inner door, took what was there,
again closed the door, and locked it.’[171]
In all this great man’s afflictive trials it must have comforted him to
remember that in the hour of the unfortunate Admiral Byng’s extremity,
when women of rank were urging a royal Princess, nothing loath, to be,
as they expressed it, ‘for his execution,’ he (Lord Chatham) had been on
the side of justice, and had used his utmost influence with the King to
procure the Admiral’s pardon, a plea for mercy that must have softened by
reflection his own death-bed.[172]
Right opposite the upper end of the garden of North End House, and no
doubt close to the highroad in former days, stands an ancient solitary
tree, known as the Gibbet Elm, one of two trees between which stood
the gallows on which, in the May of 1673, one Jackson, a notorious
highwayman, was hung in chains for the murder of Henry Miller on, or
near, the spot. There for years from season to season mouldered the
skeleton of the murderer, swinging wildly out before the scourging
winter winds, with the rusty chain-links creaking, as it were, a ghastly
requiem, or in high summer perhaps a nesting-place for birds, such
instances of bird-building between the ribs or in the skulls of felons
being not uncommon in those days, when gibbets were more plentiful by
the waysides than hand-posts. After long years of purgatorial nights
and days, Nature would receive into her bosom the time-bleached bones,
to make the grass grow greener about the base of the old tree, whose
companion was blown down some fifty years ago.
The elm, when I last saw it in 1863-64, was still sound,[173] and, though
beaten about and storm-broken, stretched forth its branches a goodly
distance, its root
‘Like snakes in wild festoon,
In ramous wrestlings interlaced,
A forest Laocoön.’[174]
The upright of the gibbet, by one of those curious freaks common to
ancient landlords, who early learnt the attractiveness of morbid
curiosities, and knew with Trinculo that ‘those who will not give a doit
to relieve a lame beggar will lay out ten to see a dead Indian,’ was
converted into a part of the kitchen mantelpiece at Jack Straw’s Castle,
serving thenceforth as a fertile subject for the ale-consuming and
company-constraining gossip of times not so long past, when few cared to
cross the Heath alone after nightfall—times of which Hicks’s Hall and the
Newgate Calendar keep record still.
[Illustration: _Old Cottages, North End._]
Passing Heath Lodge, we leave the footpath for the main road, and find
ourselves at North End. In Elizabeth’s time this was literally wildwood
and waste. Here, as at Belsize, Gerard found what he calls the white
butterfly orchis, ‘near unto a small cottage in the way as you go from
London to Hendon, a village thereby, in the field next the pound, or
pinnefold without.’
North End, so called from its situation at the northern extremity of
the Heath, consists of a cluster of middle-class houses, cottages, and
pleasant gardens. It does not seem, says Park, to be a place of any
antiquity. No doubt the Wildwood, as the fragment of the old forest was
quaintly called, formerly overran the site of the present hamlet, and
lingered here after the clearance of the woods from other portions of the
district.
We find it marked in the map of Middlesex in Gibson’s edition of
Camden’s ‘Britannia’ (1695) as Wildwood Corner. It had been so called
in Elizabeth’s time, and the tradition survives in the names of certain
messuages, as Wildwood, Wildwood House, Wildwood Lodge, etc.
[Illustration: _Bull and Bush, Hampstead._]
In all probability, the weather-boarded cottages opposite Wildwood
Lodge, and the cosy little inn, the Bull and Bush, are about the oldest
habitations in North End. The latter flourished when Addison wrote, and
it is said that it shared his favour, and that of his friends, in common
with the Upper Flask. In its yew-tree arbour he may have enjoyed himself
after the simple fashion of Sir Roger de Coverley, and drunk ripe ale,
and smoked his churchwarden on summer afternoons. It has its arbour and
garden still—a carefully-kept one—which makes a pretty feature of the
unpretentious but comfortable house.
In later times, Gainsborough, Garrick and Foote, Sir Joshua Reynolds (at
rare seasons), Cibber, Booth, Hogarth, and Laurence Sterne are said to
have been amongst its summer visitors. The room—an upper one—in which
their feasts, to which the company brought ‘attic salt,’ were held looks
out upon a smooth-clipped lawn with flowery borders, and commands the
little eminence overlooking Wildwood, where Blake would first appear to
the vigilant eyes of the eldest Linnell’s little daughter on Saturday
afternoons, who sat watching for the anticipated appearance of her
favourite. Upon the green lawn is the yew-bush or bower to which the inn
owes half its name, a whimsey to which rustic landlords in the eighteenth
century appear to have been much addicted. Being furnished with a table
and seats, it afforded a quiet retirement or smoking-box.[175]
Hither, in the Addison days, came the companionable Dr. George Sewell,
with some or other of his many friends, friends who, at his death in
1726, neglected even the common duties of humanity, and permitted this
accomplished gentleman and scholar to pass unhonoured to an almost pauper
grave, unfollowed but by one attendant, and with the mean obsequies of
one ‘whom nobody owns.’ He was a bachelor, and kept no house, but boarded
at Hampstead, and we are told ‘he was so much esteemed, and so frequently
invited to the tables of the neighbouring gentry, that he had seldom
occasion to dine at home.’ He contributed many papers to the supplemental
volumes of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, wrote the tragedy of ‘Sir
Walter Raleigh,’ and other works, and various poems. His writings impress
one with the feeling that he was not only a clever and versatile writer,
but a good and amiable man. No memorial was raised above his grave, but a
boundary-tree—a holly—in the hedge of the churchyard for some time marked
the place of his interment. This has long since been removed.
Coming down the years, we find that literary people, either as residents
or visitors, more and more affected Hampstead and the Heath. No matter of
surprise to us who have tasted the exhilaration of its fresh breeziness
and summer beauty, and witnessed the cold splendour of its wintry
landscapes, with a sky such as Danby delighted to paint reddening the
west, and making wider the fields of snow stretching around; the still
woods wrapped in rime, each tree crystallized, as it were; the tall
groups of elm, ash, and pine trees with each reticulated branch and spray
standing out with photographic accuracy against the clear atmosphere,
whose sharpness stings the pedestrian and warms.
It was under such conditions that Lovell Edgeworth saw the Heath when
he visited his philosophical but eccentric friend Day, the author
of ‘Sandford and Merton,’ who had ‘lodged his newly-married wife in
“inconvenient lodgings” at Hampstead.’ Edgeworth found him walking on the
Heath with her, though the snow covered the ground. But then the lady was
sensibly attired in a frieze cloak and thick shoes. She surprised the
visitor, who had been led to imagine her an exceedingly delicate person,
by an appearance of rude health. But this is beside North End.
About the year 1748 Dr. Akenside, divided between the love of poetry and
duty to his profession, endeavoured, with the assistance of his friend
the Hon. Jeremiah Dyson, who had purchased a house for him in this
neighbourhood, to establish himself as a physician at Hampstead.
We have somewhere read that the house which Akenside occupied was really
at Golder’s Hill.[176] The two statements are not irreconcilable, as in
the directory of this year Golder’s Hill is included in North End. Horace
Walpole, writing in 1750, says of him: ‘Here is another of those tame
geniuses, a Mr. Akenside, who writes odes. In one he has lately published
he says, “Light the tapers ... urge the fire!” Had not you rather make
gods jostle in the dark than light the candles, for fear they should
break their heads?’
But in criticising the poet’s ‘Pleasures of Imagination,’ he allows that
at its first appearance it attracted much notice, from the elegance of
its language and the warm colouring of the descriptions. Akenside appears
to have been a proud, cold, uncomfortable man, with an overweening
opinion of his abilities, a dictatorial habit, a morbid sensitiveness
on the score of his connections, and a susceptibility of offence, which
seldom left him long without one. He seems to have passed a rather
disagreeable time at Hampstead.
In vain his weak but generous friend and patron introduced him at the
clubs and balls, the assemblies and the Long-room; he failed to make
himself popular with the men, and was ‘too indifferent to feminine nature
to ingratiate himself with their wives and daughters.’ So that, with all
his mental accomplishments, his handsome person, and the genius which
Southey says distinguished his face, he made no friends, but, on the
contrary, many enemies.
When the secret of his family connections, and his dependence on Mr.
Dyson, who generously allowed him £300 a year, oozed out, society at
Hampstead, composed for the most part of opulent City men—which means
successful men, too prone to despise the want of success in others—made
no secret of its contempt for Akenside’s pretensions to superiority, and
the end was that in less than three years all hopes of his succeeding as
a physician at Hampstead had to be given up. Mr. Dyson then took a small
house for him in Bloomsbury Square, and continued his allowance till his
death in 1770, in the forty-ninth year of his age.
A pleasant reminiscence of North End is that for some years it continued
to be the chosen home of William Collins, the artist, who, from his
boyhood, as his talented son has told us in his delightful memoir of him,
had loved Hampstead, and spent many a summer day there, ‘watching the
bird-catchers with their decoys and nets, the hedger with his high tanned
gloves and bill-hook, cows going afield, hay-makers, and rosy rustic
children.’
As he grew up, his love of Hampstead grew with him, and we catch glimpses
of the young art student, sketching in the delightful fields and bosky
lanes, occasionally laying down his pencil to refresh himself, as it
were, with the quaintly-written devotional hymns of George Herbert, which
he carried with him. In 1822-23 he married Miss Giddies, and in the
summer of the same year took a cottage at Hampstead, and ‘in tranquillity
and the companionship of his young wife studied Nature unremittingly.’
Hampstead Heath, which lay close to his door, became the scene and source
of his best pictures.
‘Here he found his footsore trampers; the patched or picturesquely ragged
beggars; the brutish or audacious boys; the itinerant rat-catcher,
with the _dirt-shine_ on his leather breeches, and his ferrets and
cage of rats.’ Like Linnell, Leslie, and Constable in those days, and
Gainsborough in previous ones, he was never tired of the sweet beauty of
his surroundings, or of exhibiting them to his friends. He was for ever
discovering fresh points of view and new effects, and Hampstead proved to
him, as to all other lovers and students of Nature, inexhaustible.
[Illustration: _Cottages, North End._]
In 1829 his fame and fortune had both outgrown what Wilkie called his
‘beautiful cottage at North End,’ and he was intending to build himself
a house upon the Heath; but there were difficulties in the way of the
purchase of the ground, which caused him eventually to give up the idea
of building, and content himself with renting a larger house near the
Heath. In the end he returned to London, where the latter years of his
life were spent. It was at North End, according to the author of the
‘Northern Heights,’ that his three talented sons were born, and here
Wilkie—his great friend—and many other artists, and men of note visited
him.
Shortly before 1813, Mr. Abraham Robarts, senior partner in the banking
house of Robarts, Curtis and Co., resided at North End, in the house
previously occupied by —— Dingley, Esq., about 1777, a gentleman
memorable for the part he took in the introduction of sawing-mills into
this country, which the mob resented and destroyed.
When Park wrote his History, the same house (but he does not describe
its situation) was in the possession of John Vivian, Esq., solicitor to
the Excise. In all probability it was the square brick house at the end
of the avenue, which the inhabitants of North End regard as the house
which Dr. Akenside resided in—the house with the newly-laid-out garden
running up on one side under the umbrageous shade of the trees that once
sheltered a lovely glade, locally known as the Lovers’ Bank or Lover’s
Walk, and which, through oversight or forgetfulness on the part of
those entrusted with the preservation of the Heath, was left out in the
purchase of it, and was granted to the present owner. In this house at
one period resided Sir Fowell Buxton, the friend and fellow-labourer with
Clarkson and Wilberforce, in their noble efforts for the emancipation
of the negro, which led to the abolition of slaves in our colonies, and
began that crusade which we are still waging on their behalf. At that
period his sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Buxton, was living at Wildwood, in
Mrs. Earle’s house, the white house facing the avenue. It is right that
the homes of eminent men and women should be remembered, and amongst such
homes at North End, Wildwood Cottage is one of the most interesting. Here
for some time lived Dinah Mulock, the late Mrs. Craik, author of ‘John
Halifax,’ and other standard works of fiction; and here subsequently
resided, from 1864 to 1871, Eliza Meteyard, the painstaking author of
the ‘Life of Wedgwood the Potter,’ a work containing much valuable
information on the subject of this beautiful manufacture, the interest
in which her labour undoubtedly contributed to revive and enlarge. Here
she expended years of studious research in the prosecution of her task,
in recognition of which Mr. Gladstone—himself a lover and collector of
the charming ware—granted her a Government pension of £100 per annum,
which, however, she only lived to enjoy one year. She may be said to have
lost her life for the sake of her strong interest in the study of this
beautiful fabric. Having accepted a pressing invitation from members
of the Liverpool Society of Arts to be present at a conversazione and
exhibition of Wedgwood ware, she travelled back to town in very inclement
weather, and took a chill, which brought on (being neglected) pulmonary
complications, ending in her death, which took place in 1879, she dying
in the arms of her old friend, the writer of these few lines. Popularly
she was better known as the ‘Silver Pen’ of Douglas Jerrold’s and other
magazines, in which she strongly advocated the higher education of the
people.
For some time Coventry Patmore, the author of ‘The Angel in the House,’
and other charming poems, resided at North End, and here he lost his
loving and beloved wife (1862).
We pass the gray, unprepossessing-looking cottage to the east of the
large house on the right of Golder’s Hill, known as the Manor House,
and said to occupy the site of the ancient North Hall Manor, included
with that of Hampstead, and granted by Edward VI. to his favourite,
Sir Thomas Wroth, Knight. Shortly before Belsize Gardens were closed,
an attempt was made to popularize a medicinal well at North End, and
render it fashionable as a Spa and pleasure-place; and though it is
said by contemporaries that Belsize Gardens exceeded in immorality and
dissipation any place of the kind in modern times, an advertisement in
the _Daily Post_ of the opening of the New North End Hall Wells, after
promising a profusion of amusement, etc., coolly adds that ‘great care
will be taken to keep up the same decorum in everything as at Belsize.’
In 1811 the Lords Granville were living at North End, and Sir Francis
Willes for some time occupied North End House. In 1806 Lady Wilson,
proprietress of the manor, brought an action against him for cutting turf
on the Heath, ‘then covered with grass, and fit for cattle,’ which action
put an end to this practice, which every copyholder believed he had a
right to, and which was pronounced to be inconsistent with the rights of
common pasture.
Golder’s Hill, the seat of Sir Spencer Wells, occupies a large piece of
ground, skirted on the side nearest the Heath by the new ride.[177]
To the left of the North End Road are several good houses with enclosed
grounds and gardens. The road follows the bend of what was probably a
morass in ancient times, but is fertile meadow-land now; and we are
told that within memory rushes grew, quaint rural things! at the very
point where the North End Road cuts the Finchley Road, and the way was
fringed by some magnificent old trees, which have been cut down, with the
advantage of throwing open an extensive view of Hendon Fields.[178]
Hence the North End Road runs on to its terminus at the hand-post on
Golder’s Green.
The _Lady’s Magazine_, in 1816, announced the death at North End,
Hampstead, at an advanced age, of Elizabeth Dowager Marchioness of
Waterford, in January, 1816 (no other date); whether resident or a
visitor was not stated.