The Humble Offering of a Gratefull Heart.
Richᵈ: Steele
There might have been an ampler number of them, perhaps, but for the proximity of the Upper Flask and Bull and Bush taverns, and the near neighbourhood of the Wells. But it is still pleasant to fancy the lifting of the gate-latch, and to see in imagination going up the garden-path, or issuing from it, with Steele in the midst of them, Arbuthnot and Gay and Pope, and it may be Swift, famous associates and friends, whose almost centuries-old footsteps—for those who care to look beneath the surface of the present—underlie the dust upon the hillside, and give the road a charm beyond its own.
Their pungent repartees, their brilliant fancies and clever witticisms, those mental coruscations of the moment, may yet be floating airily in space, but the more solid portions of their intellectual riches have become national endowments, and their harvest result is with us yet.
The commonplace row of mean shops called Steele’s Terrace marks the place where Steele’s double-fronted cottage stood, elevated some 15 feet above the roadway, with a large strip of garden ground before it, but solitary even when I was accustomed to see it, no other house being close to it.
Nichols, quoted by Park, alluding to Steele’s disappearance from town to this ‘solitude’ at Hampstead, writes, ‘It is to be feared that there were too many pecuniary reasons for this temporary retirement,’ a supposition generally adopted by Sir Richard’s biographers. I venture to think that another cause existed more pressing than the importunities of creditors or the exigencies of straitened means. Exactly one month after Steele’s letter to Pope, describing his whereabouts, Swift, writing to Mrs. Dingley from the old Court suburb, under the date of July 1, 1712, tells her ‘Steele was arrested the other day for making a lottery directly against an Act of Parliament; he is now under prosecution, but they think it will be dropped out of pity. I believe he will very soon lose his employment, for he has been mighty impertinent of late in his Spectators, and I will never offer a word on his behalf.’[40]
Feeling himself disgraced, and desirous of keeping out of the way of his town acquaintances, seems a more cogent reason for his seclusion than the fear of his creditors, especially when we learn that the Spectator, instead of falling off in popularity, was selling better than ever and at double its original price; and that at the close of this summer he had taken a house for his wife in Bloomsbury Square, which does not look as if he was in want of funds.
As for the irritable Dean, who had threatened to do nothing for him, a little further on in his ‘Correspondence’ he is telling the same lady of all he had done for the Whigs, and adds that he had ‘kept Steele in his place.’[41]
Leaving Steele’s cottage, we pass England’s Lane on the left—a lane famous for its blackberry hedges and the pleasant fields in the neighbourhood of the late Mr. Bell the publisher’s house; but all has changed, and the once rural lane is now a path between brick walls and garden fences. Farther on is Park Road, leading to the newly-made Fleet Road and Gospel Oak Station; and on the other side of the way, a little further on, Upper Park Road, with fragrant nursery-grounds spreading over the same distance on the right, reminiscent of the times when it was all ‘flowers and gardens’ on that side of the way to Hampstead. The road is still attractive with its handsome houses, standing behind well-grown trees in well-kept gardens; but formerly, on the ascent of Haverstock Hill, the outside passenger by the old stage-coach on looking back found himself repaid on a clear day by a brief prospect of the great city, with ‘the dome of St. Paul’s in the air,’ and all the surrounding spires, towers, and cupolas that ascend above the city roofs.
We leave Haverstock Terrace (now Belsize Grove), leading to Belsize Gardens, on the left, and a little above it, to the right, the sloping grass-fields—as yet unbuilt on, but marked for speculation—and a pleasant view, between the poplars shading the top of Haverstock Hill, of green Highgate, and the smooth mound of Traitors’ Hill west, with Camden Town crowding up to the new Cattle Market, and tiers of houses covering what were once Copenhagen Fields, an engraving of which, dated 1782, lies before me, and shows these fields with only one habitation in them, Copenhagen House, a tea-drinking place, the popularity of which extended for a considerable time into the present century.