Middlesex. A. R. Hope Moncrieff

MIDDLESEX, squeezed up as it is among more expansive beauties, and too much overshadowed by the chimneys of Greater London, may not be thought of as a show county. But no shire need hang its head that contains such scenery, still hardly spoiled, as can be found about Hampstead Heath, Enfield Chase, Harrow Weald, and the leafy heights of Pinner, with many islets of pleasant greenery not yet drowned in the brick-and-mortar deluge. Its very misfortune of being so near a rich city contributes one feature of ornament in notably frequent parks, pleasure grounds, and gardens. Then its hills, vales, and woods can boast a special interest in having perhaps inspired more of our great poets than has any larger English county. The writer has explored it in every corner, marking out charms often neglected by those who hurry over its dusty or muddy high roads to reach neighbouring bounds that have not always a better right to give themselves airs of rurality.

MIDDLESEX

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I
LONDON’S COUNTY

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FRESH from having sounded Surrey’s praise, I find myself called on to put a new barrel into my organ for the tune of Middlesex. At once comes to mind a scene in a petty sessions court, where it was a certain lawyer’s business to tear to rags the character of a witness on the opposite side, as he did with professional gusto. But when the next case came on, it was the turn of this damaged witness to stand in the dock; then the lawyer himself led the laugh raised by his announcement: “I appear for the prisoner, your worships!” Clients must reckon with such awkward chances where a small knot of country solicitors divide the alternation of blowing hot and cold on the course of justice.

At the time I thought this particular client unfairly used; but it occurs to me that I am now in much the same plight as was his turncoat champion. In that volume on Surrey I had not foreseen how I was to hold a brief for Middlesex, with which I then made some odious comparisons, and called Cobbett to witness, in his downright way, against the latter county as “all ugly.” Now, we hack-writers, a poor but more or less honest tribe, do not pump up sweet or bitter so easily as those fountains of legal eloquence that at the Old Bailey or elsewhere stand ready to spout high moral indignation, touching emotion, and jury-bamboozling argumentation for whichever party may be first to put a fee in their slot. The literary conscience being less elastic, I have nothing for it but to acknowledge that, in the heat of advocacy for Surrey, I was led into speaking with too little respect of its neighbour across the Thames. As for my witness, counsel on the other side might easily show that he had an itch for venting random abuse, that on occasion he vilipended the fairest parts of his beloved Surrey, and that he lived in the flattest and tamest corner of the slandered county. As for myself, casting off the metaphor of wig and gown, I humbly and heartily cry peccavi, I recant my error, and in the following sheets will stand to do ample penance for having said any word that might bring a blush of resentment to the cheek of Middlesex. What I may have hinted to its disparagement was spoken in haste, without malice, and I trust fully to explain it away after the example of that courtly German tutor who, on his princeling pupil translating albus as “black,” remarked, “Quite so, your Transparency—black, but not indeed absolutely black; rather verging on grey—one might say light grey, or even white, if his Serene Highness will graciously allow.”

In sober earnestness, as English counties go, there is little need of apology for Middlesex, which, if not ranking as a show county, and certainly not so charming, on the whole, as Surrey, has some bits hard to match. It may be truly said of this green-robed damsel that “when she is good she is very, very good,” and that when not so good, she is seldom “horrid.” The worst of it is flats fit for market-gardens and football fields, of which the largest stretch extends on the west side of London. Yet here, too, one is seldom out of sight of some pleasant rise, some oasis of park wood, some straggling line of hedgerow timber; and even that most dreary edge of the county, the marshlands of the Lea, is overlooked by the heights of Clapton and Enfield. The general character is a gently undulating surface, swelling more boldly in the heights north of London, and in the ridge above Stanmore, where, at its junction with Hertfordshire, Middlesex reaches a highest point of about 500 feet. The most marked features are those two lines of high ground, the latter walling in the north side and curving round on the north-west, then between them the basin of the Brent, in which stand up isolated hills like that of Harrow.

So far as size goes, Middlesex has little to boast of, being the smallest but one of English counties, not half so big as Surrey. A winter day’s stroll would bring us through its greatest length, and at one point it might be stepped across in a couple of hours. On the other hand, its smaller area has a considerably larger population than Surrey’s, even excluding its bigger half of the Metropolitan area. But more thickly packed as it is with suburbs and villages, farms and factories, Middlesex is not so well off as Surrey for good old independent towns, and for capital has to content itself with the shabby squalor of Brentford. London seems to have cast its shadow on this side so as to stunt the growth of puny boroughs. Another contrast between the two counties is in shape, Surrey being, on the whole, more compactly contained than its sprawling neighbour. But the most striking difference is that of soil, Surrey marked off in zones of clay, chalk, and sand, that give its special ornament of dimpled variety, while Middlesex shows mainly a smug face of London clay, only here and there spotted by sandy pimples, gravelly scabs, rare warts of rock, or more frequent freckles of brick earth, in most parts interlarded

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