_HAMPSTEAD LATER ON._
In later years, as soon as May fretted the Kilburn meadows with cowslips,
and the birds began to warble the livelong day and half the night in the
woods and the thickets and groves upon the Heath, sensitive persons ‘in
populous city pent’ found themselves irresistibly drawn to one or other
of the many paths crossing the Marylebone fields, or that ran up from the
west, by Lisson Grove, then a tree-shaded, pleasant neighbourhood of good
houses, and so by Kilburn meadows to the Heath and Hampstead, ‘each rural
sight, each rural sound, fraught with delight.’
Such persons sought it simply for the pleasure of the place, the charming
views, the ‘sweet, salutary air,’ the walk, and a few hours’ idling on
the turfy slopes of the West Heath, or elm-shaded lovers’ bank now lost
to us. Every breath was an inspiration of health, every whiff of air came
laden with the odours of melilot and sweet-scented vernal grasses—not yet
quite ready for the scythe. For some travellers there followed luncheon
or a cosy dinner at one or other of the favourite taverns (there were
no hotels in those days), and for frugal mothers and their little ones
tea or new milk, home-made bread and fresh-churned butter, the milk from
the Morland-like farmhouse at North End, familiar to us as Collin’s
farm,[276] or at some convenient cottage, the cleanliness and modest
charges of which were well known, and tried by past experiment.
[Illustration: _Dr. Johnson._]
Amongst these summer visitors to Hampstead in the last half of the
eighteenth century many old familiar names jostle. Here we again meet
Dr. Johnson, with his dictionary speech and ponderous learning, dogmatic
and dictatorial as ever. But he has in the meantime finished his great
word-book, and, no longer dependent on booksellers, but much to his
comfort, though directly against his principles (thanks to Lord Bute),
is in the receipt of a Government pension of £300 a year, and able to
indulge the active benevolence of his nature, and to make his house
in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, an asylum of bounty to many grumbling
dependents, hardly grateful to him. Mercifully, ‘Tetty’ had deceased
before the augmentation of her husband’s means could help her in the
larger development of her personal wants; and though he decorously
mourned her with closed doors for forty days, he by this time, with the
aid of company and the clubs, appears to have overcome his sorrow, and to
be having an excellent time of it in the society of Mr. Reynolds (not yet
Sir Joshua), with whom almost from the period of his coming to town he
had had a club and tavern familiarity. At last, according to Northcote,
after many failures, he had succeeded in getting admission to the great
painter’s house in Leicester Fields, as well as to the tea-table of his
sister, Miss R. Reynolds, with whom he soon became a prime favourite.
It was after criticising the “Percy Ballads,” and drinking unnumbered
cups of his favourite beverage, that the Doctor (the rhythm of the verses
running in his head) burst into his clever impromptu imitation of it:
‘Oh, hear it then, my Renny dear,
Nor hear it with a frown:
You cannot make the tea as fast
As I can pour it down.’
It was after this that he made the acquaintance of the rich Bermondsey
brewer, Mr. Thrale, and his young and clever papillon wife (afterwards
Mrs. Piozzi), and became a weekly guest, and subsequently almost a
fixture, at their hospitable Streatham home, Thrale Park. Better fortune
has made but little change in him so far as appearance is concerned: he
is just as slovenly and personally uncared for as in the years gone by;
perhaps, if possible, he is even more awkward and ungainly, because grown
more massive, so that, though written of another,[277] it might be said
of him,
‘When _Johnson_ treads the street the paviours cry,
“God bless you, sir,” and lay their rammers by.’
Yet it is something added to the interest of Hampstead and its walks,
that they have known the weight of the great Doctor’s tread, and the
pressure of the serviceable oaken staff with which he steadied the
uncertain movements of his unwieldy frame and vacillating legs, which,
like his arms, to quote Lord Chesterfield, were never in the position
which, according to the situation of his body, they ought to be in.
His burly figure is so familiar to us—thanks to friend Reynolds—that
we can easily imagine him rolling along, not averse to a talk with any
intelligent passer-by, for he himself was an illustration of his own
remark, ‘that one man would learn more in a journey by the Hampstead
coach, than another would in the course of the Grand Tour.’
It is not the love of Nature, however beautiful, or of fine views, that
brings him here—he valued neither. Either he accompanies friends, or
expects to meet some or other of his club associates, Goldy or Garrick,
whom he ‘allows no man to find fault with but himself.’ Or it may be
Hogarth in his sky-blue coat, who, with the actor, likes to be where
folks foregather, and loves Hampstead for its own sake. Did he not select
the Hampstead Road for the scene of his “March to Finchley”?[278] There
was a time when he brought with him his favourite friend, the genial old
sea-captain, Thomas Coram. How could a kindly-hearted man, the merriest
in Fleet Street, enjoy the finest views, and air nearest heaven in his
neighbourhood, and not desire the Jonathan of his soul to share them
with him? While he, having seen his scheme of a foundling hospital
accomplished, could with a white conscience afford himself a ‘sunshine
holiday.’ But all that is past. The old philanthropist died in 1751, and
‘Home had gone and ta’en his wages.’
As it is, what a unique party they must have made at one or other of the
pleasant taverns, and how much has Boswell lost for us, by not hearing
the rich after-dinner talk of them over the ‘wine and walnuts,’ or bowl
of punch, or often the homelier refreshment of brown ale and clean
Broseley pipes! The number they smoked and the quantity of ale they
consumed remains a social problem of their times unsolved.
The Well Walk is clean swept out of many of its old properties, but
the Tavern, the Episcopal Chapel, with a modern Pump House, and the
Long Room on the other side of the way, still remain. In summer the
Walk is seldom destitute of company; either the force of habit or the
associations of the spot attract visitors to it. At this period patients,
though few, were never wholly absent, and conversation and cards had
still their headquarters in the Long Room; invalids naturally preferred
the level walk and the benches in the Lime-tree Avenue, from which the
unimpeded view eastward must have been very charming.
[Illustration: _James Boswell._]
It seems a long way back to the days when Addison, with that knot of
literary men (‘who gave a more undying lustre to the reign of Queen Anne
than even the brilliant victories of Marlborough’) met here; yet Pope,
the last of them (save Swift), had been lavish in praise of Richardson’s
“Pamela,” and knowing nothing personally of Johnson at the time, but the
reputation of his scholarship, and of his poverty, upon the publication
of the latter’s poem, “London,” used all he had of influence with Swift,
and that of others with Lord Gower, to procure the writer of it an
Irish degree, so that the title of Doctor might enable him to obtain a
mastership of £60 per annum. The act was unsolicited, and should always
be remembered to the credit of the bard of Twickenham. Pope had passed
away, but Johnson had personally known him. Richardson, whom we last met
in 1748, and who had fed ever since on the honey of feminine adulation,
is still an occasional visitor to Hampstead, and finds his way to the
Well Walk with his old friend Mrs. Donnellan, where Mrs. Delany and the
Dean, who managed to spend a considerable portion of their time on this
side of the Channel, might sometimes be met with, for they had personal
connections and friends in Hampstead and the neighbourhood.[279]
Dapper little Colley Cibber, ‘the greatest fop either on or off the
stage’ that Lady Braidshaigh had ever seen—‘an irreclaimable old sinner’
she calls him—still visits his favourite suburb, and haunts the precincts
of the altered Wells, hunting after new faces, and as happy if he can
obtain the notice of a fine woman as he was at the age of seventy-seven,
when Richardson found him dabbling with the Tunbridge Waters, and
described his vanity in a letter to Miss Mulso. In the interim one of
his odes has been set to music by Mr. Greene, and been sung in the
clubs and coffee-houses. But some things have gone out of his life. Mr.
Foote is too busy with his summer performances at the Hay market to be
wiled from business by the ancient Laureate, and his old friend, the
handsome, clever Barton Booth, has long since found a place amongst the
celebrities in Poets’ Corner.
Pertinaciously present at the Assembly balls and in the Long Room, we
should see Dr. Akenside, pale and proud, and with the stamp of genius on
his handsome brow, passing without recognition, or meeting supercilious
looks of contempt, which he is not slow to return with scorn.
Sometimes Garrick brings his graceful Viola (she was called Violette by
command of Maria Theresa), on the occasion of a special concert or other
entertainment in the Long Room, where Goldsmith, who loves music, and
still better to escort Miss Reynolds and her friends, appears in bag-wig
and sword and his second-best suit of ‘Queen’s blue silk,’ lined with
satin. Once Miss Reynolds was asked to toast the ugliest man she knew,
and instantly named Oliver Goldsmith, but on reading “The Traveller,”
rescinded her opinion. The beautiful thoughts of the poet transfigured
the man, and she could never after think him ugly.
Another noticeable person seen here from time to time was the cheerful,
chatty Dr. Young, the protégé of Mrs. Boscawen, widow of the Admiral who
resided at Colney Hatch, the friend and correspondent of Richardson.
Young’s daily utterances had no affinity with his sombre “Night
Thoughts,” lines lit with loveliness though many of them be. Charming
Mrs. Montague, too, occasionally appeared—a little later than May Day,
when she was wholly engaged with her annual feast and garden-party, her
guests being the little sweeps of London, enfranchised for one summer day
in their miserable existence by this lady’s compassionate thought for
them. Her death must have been a real sorrow for the black brotherhood
of London climbing boys, their one friend out of all the great multitude
of its inhabitants, till Elia’s gentle-hearted friend Jem White for some
years resumed the festival.
As we have said, the persons we have recalled are well known to us,
almost as well as if we had lived, and walked, and talked amongst them;
they stand out saliently from the general company. But there is a new
order amongst these whom we know not. The Toupees, young gentlemen of
fashion, who, while periwigs were still worn, wisely took the ordering
of their heads into their own hands, and wore their own hair powdered
and brushed up from the forehead in a top-knot or toupee. They appear to
have been the precursors of the modern masher, and when on the Mall, or
at Ranelagh, or Vauxhall, were said to be composed of powder, lace, and
essences. ‘You may know them,’ says one authority, ‘by the dress of the
toupee, the buckles in their shoes, the choice of the waistcoat, and the
cock of the hat.’[280]
But there were times when these ‘pretty fellows’ aspired to quite
another rôle, that of hackney-coach and curricle driving, the latter
vehicle being of such a height and build as to render the exercise
really dangerous. Yet to drive furiously was a _sine quâ non_; and as
the public parks scarcely admitted of such performances, the race-course
at Hampstead was a favourite rendezvous for these “young bloods,” and
the Chicken House, and other summer lodgings, were for some seasons much
patronized by Templars, and other youths in the ranks of the Toupees.
To old ladies they seem to have been a terror in more ways than one, and
they do not always appear to have put off the characteristics of the
hackney coachman with his three-caped coat. When Swift, remembering the
clever horsewoman Lady Betty Germain had been when Lady Betty Berkeley,
recommended her for her health’s sake to ride when in London, among other
reasons which she gave him for not doing so was this: that ‘nothing
would more rejoice the Toupees than to see a horse throw an ancient
gentlewoman.’ Miss Burney a few years later introduces us, in ‘Evelina,’
to some of these eighteenth-century Jehus.
Meanwhile, one after the other of the frequenters of the Hampstead walks
we have recalled is missed from them. First the soft-hearted old seaman,
Captain Coram, passes away; then Colley Cibber vanishes; and Richardson
dies (1761), and is followed a year later by his venerable friend,
Mrs. Donnellan. More than a dozen years after Richardson’s death, I
find in the delightfully-named ‘Flowers of Parnassus,’ in the _Monthly
Miscellany_ for 1774, ‘Lines addressed to a Lady weeping over “Clarissa.”’
From the period of what is called the Augustan Age of English literature,
Hampstead had claims to be considered, if not the literary suburb which
it subsequently became, at least an appanage of the Muses. If their most
famous representatives did not absolutely reside here, they were, at all
events, frequent visitors, so much so that the Muses themselves were
poetically fabled to have forsaken
‘Aganippe’s font,
And hoof-ploughed Hippocrene,’
for
‘Hampstead courted by the western winds,’
as Dr. Armstrong in his poem to ‘Health’ sings of the upland suburb,
where he and his brother resided for some time, being very well regarded
by the inhabitants. Could the doctor have been that other ‘tame genius’
that Horace Walpole bracketed with Akenside?
In those years plain little Thomas Gray,[281] who could see the ‘northern
heights’ from his lodgings west of the museum, with their woods and massy
elms, and loved them as much as Milton had done—Gray of the deathless
‘Elegy,’ that, had he never written another line, would have ranked
him with the immortals, might occasionally have been met wandering
alone upon the Heath, or in the company of friends in the walks, an
incomprehensible poet to the author of ‘Rasselas,’ who could neither feel
his sensitiveness to the influence of Nature nor the exquisite pathos of
this poem.
As one by one the bright lights of literature faded out, others arose
in their stead, and found their way as visitors to the topmost of the
London levels. Dr. Johnson still survives the greater number of his
contemporaries, and is occasionally to be found at Hampstead, a guest at
the suburban feasts given by his friends.
In 1778 Miss Burney’s ‘Evelina’ appeared, to the surprise and delight of
the world of letters, and little Fanny Burney, Dr. Johnson’s ‘Fannikin,’
became famous. Certain scenes in her novel assure us of her acquaintance
with Hampstead Wells and its sometime visitors. Her description of the
ball in the Long Room has done as much to memorise that building as
Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ did for the Upper Flask and Flask Walk.
When, in 1782, ‘Cecilia’ was published, Miss Burney’s fame enlarged.
The greatest men of the day eulogized her works, and overwhelmed her
with compliments and congratulations, Burke, Johnson, Reynolds, Windham,
Gibbon, and Sheridan being of the number. At public places she became the
‘observed of all observers,’ and the gaze of admiring crowds ‘followed
her along the Steyne at Brighton, and the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells.’
Two years later, in 1784, the year her friend Dr. Johnson died, Mrs.
Barbauld was staying in London, and witnessed a balloon exhibition at
the Pantheon, which occupied the site of the future opera-house. In a
letter to her niece she observes that next to the balloon Miss Burney
is the object of curiosity. In the next year, 1785, when the Barbaulds
moved from Wimbledon to Hampstead, Mrs. Barbauld brought her literary
reputation with her, and was at once received in the best local society,
the centre of which at this time, as I have elsewhere said, was Heath
House, the home of the liberal-minded Quaker banker, Samuel Hoare. Here
she made the acquaintance of many literary persons of note, amongst
others that of Dr. Beattie, and Dr. George Crabbe, the author of the
‘Borough,’ the poet of the poor as he was called, and subsequently
that of Mrs. Hannah More, Miss Seward, Mme. Chapone, and, in curious
contrast with them, the banker-poet, Samuel Rogers, and later still
Montgomery, whose sobriquet was ‘Satan,’[282] and nearer again to this
century Campbell, and Coleridge. In the autumn of 1788 I find Samuel
Rogers writing to Mrs. Barbauld that they are to have an assembly at the
Long Room on Monday, October 22, ‘which they say will be a pretty good
one,’ inviting her to join their party. He was probably staying with his
sisters at Hampstead, a frequent practice in those days instead of going
to the seaside.
In 1855 the author of the ‘Pleasures of Imagination’ and various other
works died, aged ninety-two years. He was born in 1763.
In 1785 there had appeared in the journals and magazines of the day the
appointment of Miss Burney to the Court function of Dresser to the Queen,
and for five years the literary world lost sight of the clever novelist,
who at their expiration managed to get enfranchised from what had proved
to her the house of bondage, and we find her at Hampstead in 1792, the
guest of the celebrated Mrs. Crewe.
At this time many notable persons were living here. Lord Loughborough,
rather tolerated than trusted, resided in the Chesterfields’ old house,
which we are told resembled in appearance an ancient French château, and
on receiving the title of Lord Rosslyn he renamed it Rosslyn House. Lord
Erskine had his home at the Evergreens, or Evergreen Hill, as it was
sometimes called, not very far from Caen Wood, Lord Mansfield’s seat,
and Lord Thurlow, the ‘lion of the law,’ had a retreat at Hampstead. His
town residence was in Great Ormond Street, then abutting in the rear on
fields, whence the thieves who stole the Great Seal made their way to
the house. Other men high in legal office, bankers, and rich merchants,
were living at Frognal, and North End; and so far as rank and wealth were
concerned, the village of Hampstead at this period was eminently favoured.
Lord Thurlow, who seems to have ostentatiously set social laws at
defiance, in spite of fashion, was wont to appear amongst the visitors
‘wearing his full suit of cloth of the old mode, great cuffs, massy
buttons, great wig, long ruffles,’ his black eyebrows exceeding in size
any Lord Campbell had ever seen, and ‘his voice, though not without
melody, was like the rumbling of murmuring thunder.’[283] Fanny Burney
says of his voice: ‘Though low, it was very melodious.’ I do not know if
when at Hampstead he permitted the companionship of the tame white goose
by which he was generally attended in his London home, and which followed
him about his grounds, and is said to have been never absent from his
consultations. If so, the presence of his feathered pet must have
considerably added to the grotesqueness of his own; for a gentleman’s
dress of the period, as established ‘in the polite circles of St. James’s
and at Bath,’ consisted of a light-coloured French frock, with gilt wire
or gold buttons, breeches of the same colour, and tamboured waistcoats
for afternoon dress. His lordship’s wide-skirted coat, like the rest
of his habiliments, must have been a score of years behind the mode.
Strong passions and a hard, vindictive, unforgiving nature lowered in the
large dusky eyes and thick, almost meeting eyebrows of his lordship. His
treatment of the daughter who had offended him by marrying the man she
loved, but who nursed her father with the greatest tenderness in his last
illness, fully bears out the character that his countenance indicated.
With the commencement of the present century, new names appear in
connection with Hampstead and its celebrities. Joanna Baillie, the shy
girl of Mrs. Barbauld’s acquaintance, upon the publication of her tragedy
of ‘De Montfort,’ was at once accepted as a genius and poetess. A few
years later Sir Walter Scott visited Sweet Hampstead to do her honour,
and heralded the poet of Rydal Mount,[284] some years in advance of his
appearance there in person. Later on in the present century we find Lord
Byron, for his health’s sake, I presume, spending some weeks of summer
in one of the toy cottages in the Vale of Health, two doors distant from
that subsequently tenanted by Leigh Hunt. It was on a window-pane of this
humble habitation, and not, as has been stated, in Leigh Hunt’s cottage,
which he never visited, that he wrote with a diamond (a favourite
amusement of the time when diamonds were less common than in these days)
two lines which are said to have afterwards appeared in ‘Childe Harold.’
In 1816 the presence of Leigh Hunt, fresh from expiating, by a fine of
£1,000 and three years’ confinement in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the crime
of libellously characterizing the Regent as ‘a fat Adonis of fifty,’
is felt as a social shock by some of the eminently loyal residents of
Hampstead, especially when the magnetism of the man attracted Shelley
to him—the disowned and denounced Shelley; then came Charles Lamb[285]
and Keats, and robust Charles Cowden Clarke, with his voice and laugh as
strong as the blast of the rams’ horns that levelled Jericho—in brief,
the brotherhood who constituted what the critics of that day called the
‘Cockney School of Poets,’ a school whose works—those of three of them,
at least—were destined to a worldwide reputation. The ‘Essays’ of Leigh
Hunt are too delightful reading to be ever wholly laid aside.
When Keats’ first book of poems appeared, one of these critics, more
mannerly than most of them, admitted that the author had ‘a fine ear for
the grand, elaborate, and abstracted music of Nature, and now and then
catches a few notes from passages of that never-ending harmony which
God made to retain in exaltation and purity the spirits of our first
parents.’ A curious limitation to the power of an eternal harmony. At the
same time, he accuses the poems of ‘savouring too much of the foppery and
affectation of Leigh Hunt.’
When the tall, fragile figure and beautiful face of Shelley were no more
seen on the Heath, when Keats had forsaken the ‘places of nestling green
for poets made,’ and Elia and his sister were no longer met with in the
vicinity of the Vale of Health, and Leigh Hunt himself—the slight, rather
tall, straight gentleman with the wide low forehead, dark eyes, and
foreign complexion, whom Godfrey Turner remembered and described to me,
and to whom (except in height) his son Vincent, whom I knew, must have
borne a strong resemblance—had all left Hampstead, there still remained
Joanna Baillie and her literary home, which had, as time went on, become
a pilgrimage and shrine, not only to the most celebrated men and women of
England, but of those of other countries also.
[Illustration: _Keats._]
As we approach contemporary times, we find Hampstead as attractive to
the Howitts, and the authors of ‘Festus ’ and ‘Orion,’ poets who almost
‘achieved greatness,’ and yet failed to grasp it; and Westland Marston,
and William Allingham, and Ruskin, and Tennyson himself, and all the
wits of the first _Punch_ period; and that bunch of novelists who bloomed
almost simultaneously—Thackeray and Dickens, Ollier and Ainsworth, Lover
and Lever, Anthony Trollope and Douglas Jerrold, and a host of other
authors and artists; for, from the days of Addison and Sir Godfrey
Kneller, no neighbourhood has proved more in sympathy with the pursuits
of both brotherhoods, whether of pen or pencil.
Oh, those old taverns!—those trysting-places of successive generations of
wits and men of genius! May your walls, coeval with the Kit-Cats, keep
their memories green for generations yet to come, and with them those of
the men of genius of our day, whose names are ‘household words’ in the
land of their birth, and in every other English-speaking country also.
To-day, as in the older days we have attempted to recall, artists and
literary men and women still feel the attractions of the pleasant suburb,
and increase them by the magnetism of their own; for delightful as the
natural beauties of Hampstead are, how much less would they loom without
the charm of these associations that meet us everywhere, and people the
Well Walk, and the Hill, and Heath with memories of the deathless men and
women who have trodden them!
Nor do we forget that a share of this interest is due to our American
kinsfolk, who have freely sent us their stars, whilst reserving their
stripes for our enemies; for them, as for us, the facts that Washington
Irving, Longfellow, Hawthorne of the ‘Scarlet Letter,’ the fated Margaret
Fuller, Mrs. Stowe, Wendell Holmes, and many others of their gifted
nation, have made pilgrimages to the gleby Heath, and looked with loving
eyes on scenes made sacred by the transition of immortals through them,
whose works live on through the dead centuries, and whose names have
passed into glories, are so many added charms to the intrinsic ones of
our Sweet Hampstead.