So, by one way or other, we come to Harrow Hill, on which stands up the “visible church” of Charles II.‘s little joke. This hill, or isolated ridge, not so high as Hampstead, with a slighter topping of sand, wears a trim wig of houses and gardens instead of shaggy heath, and most of it is enclosed. The openest part is about the north end, where the church spire rises so conspicuously looking across the Thames Valley to Eton and Windsor, while over smoky London the Crystal Palace may be seen, or even the tower on Leith Hill. To the eye of faith, a dozen counties lie in view. For enjoying this prospect, there are seats on the terrace outside; but the consecrated view-point is that tombstone—railed in from relic-stealing admirers, as graves in Thames-side churchyards were fortified against the ghoulism of body-snatchers—on which Byron loved to lie in pensive reverie, and to gaze at the setting sun. From his Hours of Idleness it may be gathered
that the discipline of Harrow was looser in that day, when his playfellows seem to have roamed the country somewhat freely and adventurously at risk of “the rustic’s musket aimed against my life,” getting now and then into mischief, as the young poet confesses:
Nor shrunk beneath the upstart pedant’s frown,
And all the sable glories of his gown.
Their unlicensed sport of Jack-o‘-lantern hunting by night was not put down finally till long after the abolition of the once famous Silver Arrow contest. One feature in Byron’s amusements suggests poetic as well as scholastic license—“the streams where we swam” and “shared the produce of the river’s spoil.” “Ducker” was not yet made; it could hardly be the Paddington Canal that offered “buoyant billows.” “Brent’s cool wave,” if cleaner then, is a matter of three miles off at Perivale, which, as we learn from prosaic authorities, was the favourite bathing-place of that day. Such smaller streams as trickle about Harrow could yield no better spoil than sticklebacks. The one thing wanting to its prospects is a river like the “hoary Thames,” by which rival scholars,