Seven months later she had, as we have seen, joined her sister in the peaceful churchyard; but lives of a hundred years and more have been by no means rare at Hampstead.
In 1895 my attention was directed to a newspaper paragraph, containing a description of the Baillies’ residence at Hampstead, and also to some notes which had appeared from time to time in the Bookman, descriptive of remarkable houses in the locality.
The newspaper correspondent’s account of the date of the Baillies’ residence at Hampstead is certainly incorrect. He tells us that the Baillies came to London in 1791, where they lived with their brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, at 16, Great Windmill Street, Piccadilly. In 1802, shortly after the appearance of ‘Plays of the Passions,’ vol. ii., they went with their mother to live at Red Lion Hill, Hampstead, and on her death they removed to Bolton House. The first appearance of ‘De Montfort’ was, as I have shown, in April, 1800, at which time the Barbaulds were living in Church Row, from whence Mrs. Barbauld writes of the Baillies as her near neighbours, which they would not have been had they been living at Red Lion (now Rosslyn) Hill, with the whole length of Hampstead town between them.
The Barbaulds left the neighbourhood for Stoke Newington in 1802, the year this gentleman gives as that of the Baillies’ removal to Hampstead.
Still stranger is the chronology of the writer in the Bookman (1895), who gives the year of their mother’s death (1806) as the date of the Baillies’ removal to Hampstead.
CHAPTER IX.
NORTH END.
When Leigh Hunt wrote of Hampstead that it ‘was a village revelling in varieties,’ he summarised in a sentence its chief characteristic and charm.