Evidently the citizens and their wives, and others of the inhabitants of London, did not forsake the allurements of the Long Room and the Walks. Neither did the City seamstresses in their vamped-up fine clothes, nor the City fop,
‘Who put on belt and sword at Temple Bar.’
The early termination to the evening’s entertainment, in contrast with the all-night dancing Arabella had enjoyed at the Wells, is noticeable in the above advertisement, but is by no means attributable to the improved morals of the place. It appears to have sunk year by year.
The cheating at the gambling-tables led to fighting and riots. Footpads lurked in the fields and hedges, and highwaymen infested the roads, making them more than ordinarily perilous for foot-passengers, and adding greatly to the duties of the magistrates at Hicks’s Hall (the annals of which would, I imagine, throw considerable light upon the story of the Hampstead Wells at this intermediate period).
Ten years after the decline of their fashion, many of the buildings in the Well Walk disappeared, but the tavern, then known as the Whitestone Inn,[242] the Assembly-room and pump-room (under the same roof), and the Long Room, with the tea and coffee rooms adjoining it, remained. Dr. Gibbons still lived, and still retained his faith, as did Dr. Arbuthnot also, in the valuable curative quality of the water, and the invigorating air of Hampstead, which, when occasion required, he not only recommended to his friends, but sought himself. In this way it is that we find Gay here in the summer of 1722, whose friends had ‘brought him,’ as he says, ‘to Hampstead at a time when his life was despaired of,’ after the failure of the South Sea Scheme, in which his slender fortune was invested. Here, in Well Walk, we can imagine him seated, with Pope and Arbuthnot by him, owing his recovery almost as much to the tenderness of the author as to the skill of the doctor.
It was during Gay’s stay at Hampstead that he wrote his tragedy of ‘The Captive,’ which he was requested to read to the Princess of Wales at Leicester House. On that occasion, when the hour came, and he saw the Princess and her ladies in expectation, advancing ‘with reverence too great for any other attention, and pre-resolved to impress Her Royal Highness as favourably towards the poet as the poem, he quite lost sight of a footstool in the way, and, stumbling over it, fell against a large screen, which he overset, and thus made his obeisance in a style that threw the ladies into no small disorder, and himself into such a state that but for the good-nature of his royal auditor must have told severely against the effect of the tragedy,’[243] which was brought out at Drury Lane, and played on the third night by particular desire of the Princess of Wales.[244] Think of the good-natured merriment with which Arbuthnot, ‘who was seldom serious but when attacking some great enormity,’ received the account of his fat friend’s sudden projection into the royal circle; how Swift must have chuckled over the comicality, Pope and the rest of the witty brotherhood joining in a loud laugh that none would enjoy more heartily than the genial-tempered subject of it.
In 1723 I find Mrs. Pendarves writing to Swift that ‘the beautiful Irish girl, Miss Kelly’ (the Syren of this lady’s letters to her sister) ‘is at Hampstead, quite alone, and she deserves it. She is in a very expensive way, with her sickness, her servants, and her horses, high passions, low spirits, and a tyrannous father.’
Not a very pleasing picture of the wilful Irish beauty who paid Hampstead the compliment to prefer it to more fashionable places. Yet the fair widow had previously written of Miss Kelly as ‘very harmless, and not at all coquet; she brings in all the news that flies about, and now and then adds a little of her own.’
This is the lady about whom Lady Betty Germain eight years later writes to Swift, observing:
‘Miss Kelly was a very pretty girl when she went from hence, and the beaux show their good taste by liking her. I hear her father is now kind to her, but if she is not mightily altered, she would give up some of her airs and equipage to live in England.’