In later years, as soon as May fretted the Kilburn meadows with cowslips, and the birds began to warble the livelong day and half the night in the woods and the thickets and groves upon the Heath, sensitive persons ‘in populous city pent’ found themselves irresistibly drawn to one or other of the many paths crossing the Marylebone fields, or that ran up from the west, by Lisson Grove, then a tree-shaded, pleasant neighbourhood of good houses, and so by Kilburn meadows to the Heath and Hampstead, ‘each rural sight, each rural sound, fraught with delight.’
Such persons sought it simply for the pleasure of the place, the charming views, the ‘sweet, salutary air,’ the walk, and a few hours’ idling on the turfy slopes of the West Heath, or elm-shaded lovers’ bank now lost to us. Every breath was an inspiration of health, every whiff of air came laden with the odours of melilot and sweet-scented vernal grasses—not yet quite ready for the scythe. For some travellers there followed luncheon or a cosy dinner at one or other of the favourite taverns (there were no hotels in those days), and for frugal mothers and their little ones tea or new milk, home-made bread and fresh-churned butter, the milk from the Morland-like farmhouse at North End, familiar to us as Collin’s farm,[276] or at some convenient cottage, the cleanliness and modest charges of which were well known, and tried by past experiment.
Dr. Johnson.
Amongst these summer visitors to Hampstead in the last half of the eighteenth century many old familiar names jostle. Here we again meet Dr. Johnson, with his dictionary speech and ponderous learning, dogmatic and dictatorial as ever. But he has in the meantime finished his great word-book, and, no longer dependent on booksellers, but much to his comfort, though directly against his principles (thanks to Lord Bute), is in the receipt of a Government pension of £300 a year, and able to indulge the active benevolence of his nature, and to make his house in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, an asylum of bounty to many grumbling dependents, hardly grateful to him. Mercifully, ‘Tetty’ had deceased before the augmentation of her husband’s means could help her in the larger development of her personal wants; and though he decorously mourned her with closed doors for forty days, he by this time, with the aid of company and the clubs, appears to have overcome his sorrow, and to be having an excellent time of it in the society of Mr. Reynolds (not yet Sir Joshua), with whom almost from the period of his coming to town he had had a club and tavern familiarity. At last, according to Northcote, after many failures, he had succeeded in getting admission to the great painter’s house in Leicester Fields, as well as to the tea-table of his sister, Miss R. Reynolds, with whom he soon became a prime favourite.
It was after criticising the “Percy Ballads,” and drinking unnumbered cups of his favourite beverage, that the Doctor (the rhythm of the verses running in his head) burst into his clever impromptu imitation of it:
‘Oh, hear it then, my Renny dear,
Nor hear it with a frown:
You cannot make the tea as fast