been occupied by Isaac Disraeli, till he removed to London, just in time to make the future Prime Minister no native of Enfield. The house then became a school kept by Charles Cowden Clarke’s father, with John Keats as its most illustrious pupil, who, after his apprenticeship at Edmonton, used to walk over to borrow books from his old teacher. Another school in the vicinity could boast two scholars of very different renown, Captain Marryat, and Babbage, the calculating boy, of whom it is remembered that he would get up in the small hours to study on the sly, whereas the future naval novelist was keen rather for play, and distinguished himself by running away from frequent scrapes and floggings, being once captured “in the horse-pond at Edmonton.” Sir Ralph Abercromby also was an Enfield schoolboy, in days when the place made such a choice retreat from London as now is Tunbridge Wells or Leith Hill, and it can look back to older days when for wealth and dignity it held up its head above Kensington.
The younger Clarke’s Recollections of Writers are thick set with names not yet forgotten, familiar to him when his father on their walks taught the boy to plant acorns that may now be stately trees. He knew a grandfather of Bulwer Lytton and a nephew of Gilbert White. He remembered a visit from George Dyer, his father’s fellow-usher and rival in love at Northampton, whose name has been “pickled and preserved in humour” by his friend Lamb. From the school garden he sent a weekly basket of flowers, fruit, and vegetables to comfort Leigh Hunt’s imprisonment. He met Major Cartwright, the doughty Radical, then living at Enfield. There were other notabilities of the neighbourhood with whom the family of a liberal-minded schoolmaster might not come much in contact, ex-Lord Mayors, knights, and professional veterans. Abernethy, the rough-tongued surgeon, came here to die, and has a tablet in the church. At an earlier date Lord George Gordon, the Protestant firebrand, had lived hereabouts. Gough, the antiquary, is another name in a long list of notable residents that might be continued down to Walter Pater, whose childhood was spent on Chase side; and to its chequered shades, perhaps, he owed “many tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him, certain inward lights under which they most naturally presented themselves to him.”
Tom Hood for a time had his home at Winchmore Hill, and in Hone’s Table Book (1827) there is a caricature by him of Mary Lamb stuck fast on one of the high stiles common about Enfield and Edmonton. This is accompanied by a letter signed “Sojourner at Enfield,” which, I must confess, made me an accomplice in deceiving readers of my guide, Around London. Till my eyes were opened by Mr. E. V. Lucas’s edition of Lamb, I had not recognised this communication as one of Elia’s farcical fibs, with its grave attribution of the sketch “probably” to Romney, and its fragment “in the handwriting of Cowper,” going to show that the poet had designed a companion piece to John Gilpin, which should deal with his wife’s adventures while hanging about the “Bell.”
Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly said
Unto her children three,
“I’ll clamber o’er this style so high,
And you climb after me.”
But having climb’d unto the top,
She could no further go,
But sat, to every passer-by
A spectacle and show;
Who said, “Your spouse and you this day
Both show your horsemanship;
And if you stay till he comes back,
Your horse will need no whip.”
The Clarkes had left their school before Charles Lamb settled definitely in “this vale of deliberate senectitude,” so we do not understand that he here found the model for his New Schoolmaster. Charles Cowden Clarke made his acquaintance at Ramsgate, and afterwards visited him at Enfield, where from 1827 to 1833 the brother and sister lived in two adjacent houses on Chase side, first as tenants, then as lodgers of an uncongenial family next door. Both these houses, standing in a somewhat altered state, are piously marked by tablets; but in my experience not every Enfielder knows where to find them, so the pilgrim stranger may be directed to the straggling green beside “my old New River,” on the way between the two stations; here he turns up the road marked “Clay Hill,” and may look for his double shrine on the right-hand side just before reaching the spire of Christ Church. This part of Enfield, somewhat bevillaed in our time, must then have been close to the fringe of green by-ways of which Clarke speaks more lovingly than Lamb. One seldom knows how far to take seriously the whimsical humorist’s groans over the dullness of country life when fairly tried, nor his sighs for the “fresher air of London”; but there seems to be a vein of real feeling in such complaints as fill his letters from this exile—for instance, to Wordsworth: