The Skirts of the Great City. D'Anvers N.
his many distinguished guests were the poets Samuel Rogers, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Campbell, and Coleridge, the noted writer John James Park, the first historian of Hampstead, whose work, on its Topography and Natural History, published in 1814, is still the chief authority on the subject up to that date; the philanthropist William Wilberforce, and the not less devoted Sir Samuel Buxton, who succeeded him in 1824 as leader of the anti-slavery party.
Bolton House, on Windmill Hill, was long the home of the cultivated sisters Joanna and Agnes Baillie, with whom Sir David Wilkie sometimes stayed, and Mrs. Barbauld, whose husband was minister of the Presbyterian chapel on Rosslyn Hill, lived first in a house near to them, and later in one in Church Row. Mrs. Siddons, after her retirement from the stage, occupied for several years the house known as Capo di Monte, overlooking the beautiful Judges' Walk, beneath the elms of which assizes are said to have been held in 1663, when the Great Plague of London was raging. The poet-painter William Blake sometimes stayed at a farm at North End, the same later frequented by John Linnell; and the Vale of Health, in which stood the picturesque cottage owned by Leigh Hunt, will be for ever associated with the memory of that eloquent writer and of the greater John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, all of whom are known to have visited him there. Keats was with him for some days in 1816, and in 1817 took rooms in what is now No. 1 Well Walk, where he wrote the greater part of Endymion. Later he went to board with his friend Charles Armitage Brown in a house at the bottom of John Street, known as Lawn Bank, and marked by a tablet, next door to which lived Charles Wentworth Dilke, later editor of the Athenæum, by whom the poet was introduced to Fanny Brawne, with whom he fell in love at first sight. Hyperion, the Eve of St. Agnes, and five of the six celebrated sonnets were written at Lawn Bank, and Keats was looking forward to his marriage with his beloved Fanny when the illness which was to prove fatal began. She and her mother nursed him with the utmost devotion, but nothing could save him, and he was already doomed when he left them to go to Rome in 1821. His memory is still held in great honour in Hampstead, but it was reserved to an American lady, Miss Anne Whitney, who presented his bust to the Parish Church in 1895, to give practical proof of a desire to do him honour in the district he loved so well.
The Arctic explorer, Sir Edward Parry, is said to have had his headquarters at Hampstead; Prince Talleyrand lived in Pond Street during his exile from France; and Edward Irving, founder of the Irvingite sect, is said to have had a house there for a short time. The historian Sir Thomas Palgrave resided on the Green from 1834 to 1861; the poet William Allingham died in Lyndhurst Road in 1889; the novelist Diana Muloch, and the less celebrated Elizabeth Meteyard, were often in the neighbourhood. The mother of Lord Tennyson shared Rosemount, in Flask Walk, with her daughter, and was often visited there by her illustrious son. Sir Rowland Hill, the famous Postmaster-General, resided for thirty years and died at Bertram House, near St. Stephen's Church, and Hampstead was long the home of the novelist Sir Walter Besant and the well-known bibliophile Dr. Garnett.
What may perhaps be called the art era of Hampstead, when it became associated with the names of the most distinguished painters of England, was inaugurated at the end of the eighteenth century by the arrival there of George Romney, who took a house on the hill long supposed to have been that now known as the Mount, in Heath Street, though the recent discovery of a deed of tenancy seems to prove it to have been Prospect House on Cloth Hill, now the Constitutional Club. However that may be, the artist soon found his new quarters too small, and built on to them a large studio for the painting of historic pictures, which Flaxman, who visited him in it, called a fantastic structure, and in which, later, when it had become the Holly Bush Assembly Rooms, Constable gave lectures on landscape painting to the members of the Literary and Scientific Society of Hampstead. Romney did little or no work in Hampstead, for his health was already undermined when he embarked on his new enterprise, and his sojourn left no permanent impress on the neighbourhood, when he fled to Kendal to die in the arms of his long-neglected wife.
Far otherwise was it with Constable, who has done more than any one man to interpret for future generations what Hampstead was in the first half of the nineteenth century, for the Heath and the grand views from its summit inspired some of his finest landscapes, and many of his most charming drawings give details of its scenery. Even before his marriage in 1816 Constable used constantly to go up to Hampstead from his London lodgings to paint, and in 1821 he took a small cottage, No. 2 Lower Terrace, still very much what it was then, for his wife and their three little children. There they lived until 1826, when they removed to the present No. 25 Downshire Hill, but in 1827 Constable gave up his London studio, and settled down permanently with his family in Well Walk, at which house is uncertain, some saying it was No. 40, others No. 46. There his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached, died, and her loss made him cling to Hampstead more closely than ever. She was buried in the churchyard of St. John, where later her husband was laid to rest beside her.
Though the fame of no one of them is quite equal to that of Constable, many other resident artists have aided in maintaining the æsthetic traditions of Hampstead. Some of the best works of William Collins were produced in a house on the Green, and his friend Edward Irving often visited him there. Sir Thomas Beechey retired to Hampstead after his long career of activity; Edward Duncan, Edward Dighton, and Thomas Davis, all resided for some time and died there. Paul Falconer Poole was looked upon as a Hampstead artist par excellence, for he worked in the neighbourhood for some twenty-five years. William Clarkson Stanfield was devoted to the old town, and lived in what is now the Public Library, in Prince Arthur Road, from 1847 to 1865, when he removed to Belsize Park Gardens, then St. Margaret's Road, dying in his new home in 1869. Alfred Stevens, who lived for some time in Hampstead, and died there in 1875, executed the beautiful monument to the Duke of Wellington for St. Paul's, in the temporary church of St. Stephen's, which he rented for the purpose. The sculptor John Foley passed away at the Priory, Upper Terrace, in 1874, and in 1888 Frank Holl died in the house he had built for himself in Fitz-John's Avenue. The last twenty years of the long life of Miss Margaret Gillies, one of the first Englishwomen to adopt art as a profession, were spent at No. 25 Church Row, and Mrs. Mary Harrison, one of the first members of what is now the Old Water-Colour Society, resided for sixteen years and died at Chestnut Lodge. Even more intimately associated with Hampstead than any of these was George du Maurier, for he turned its scenery and the familiar incidents of its Heath to account in many of his clever drawings for Punch. 'It was,' says his friend Canon Ainger, writing in the Hampstead Annual for 1897, 'by the Whitestone Pond that the endless round of galloping donkeys suggested to him the famous caricature of the "Ponds Asinorum," and it was near a familiar row of cottages at North End that he saw the little creature of eight years old who told her drunken father "to 'it mother again if he dared."'
Du Maurier brought home his bride in 1862 to a house in Church Row, and it was there, and in New Grove House on the Upper Heath, to which he removed later, that his best work was done. He lived at Hampstead through the exciting time of the boom in his famous novel Trilby, which is said to have hastened his end, and on his death in 1896 he was buried in the churchyard of St. John.
The Parish Church of Hampstead replaces, as already stated, a much earlier chapel that was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was completed in 1745, and successfully enlarged in 1747 under the auspices of the beloved Canon Ainger, who was vicar from 1876 to 1895. It is a typical example of the style of the period of its foundation, and the ivy-clad tower that rises from the eastern end composes well with its surroundings, the eighteenth-century houses of Church Row forming a kind of avenue leading up to the main entrance.
The next oldest church in Hampstead is the Roman Catholic chapel of St. Mary in Holly Place, built in 1816, whose first minister was the French Abbé Morel, who was banished from France during the Revolution, and was visited in his retreat by many famous exiles, including the Duchesse d'Angoulême. He became so attached to his English home that he refused to return to his native land when he was recalled, and he died at Hampstead in 1852, leaving behind him a great reputation for sanctity. The year of his death