Behind the High Street, to the right, there lies a labyrinth of lanes, passages, courts, roads, groves, and squares. The map of the place shows its complications, and the irresponsibility of the builders. Houses seem to have been run up without design or order; a so-called road ends in a cul-de-sac, a square is represented by a malformed triangle, the groves are without trees. Good old houses assert themselves on high places, and mean ones crowd the ways leading up to them. All shows the extemporary mode of building locally prevalent at the time, in which no fixed plan appears; it is the old copyhold mode of temporary convenience consolidated into brick. But variety meets you everywhere. Nature herself aids it in the formation of the ground—the mounts and interposing undulations. Trees are seen here and there, and bits of primitive waste appear in quite unexpected places.
Queer old houses nestle in trellis-work and creepers, interned within high garden walls, and a little compact settlement of them tops the Mount, the altitude of which shows that of the highway to the Heath when Oliver Goldsmith, his heart still true to the memory of ‘Sweet Lissoy,’ climbed it on summer Sunday mornings, and wrote afterwards of the view from Hampstead Hill that ‘Nature never exhibited a more beautiful prospect.’ This was in 1756-57, and the road was not cut through till 1763; so that from its summit, as was said by some old author of Highgate Hill, one trod upon the top of St. Paul’s. And it may be that the solitudes of the upper Heath, with its hawthorn-thickets, its broken ground and gravelly hollows, or the stillness of the rustic lanes in its vicinity, may have proved as propitious to his Muse as they did in later times to those of Keats and Shelley. At all events, to breathe the air upon its heights must have made him who was brimful of the love of Nature feel as the gods felt when respiring that of Olympus—sublimely indifferent to mundane matters. Then the garrulous, flighty talker grew serene: he ‘communed with his own heart, and was still.’
Goldsmith.
Here, possibly, some portions of the ‘Traveller’ may have been thought out, that poem which modified for Miss Reynolds the ugliness of the sallow, melancholy-looking man with heavy, protuberant forehead, and grim frown between the brows, the result of thought which not even his friends gave him credit for, but whose ‘ill-natured eyes,’ as he himself calls them, grew tender with compassion at the sight of want and sorrow.[160]
It was another thing when, ceasing to be a mere Grub Street hack, he moved to Wine Office Court, and gave suppers, and came hither for a ‘shoemaker’s holiday,’ as he expressed it, with his ‘Jolly Pigeon’ friends. But at the period I am now writing of, Goldsmith was correcting the press for Mr. Samuel Richardson, the literary bookseller of Salisbury Court, whose epistolary novels, as we know, had taken the town by storm, and who himself frequently figured in the shady Hampstead Well walk, as also at Tunbridge Wells, where Loggan, the dwarf,[161] had included him amongst others of our Hampstead celebrities who frequented that pleasant sanatorium: Old Colley Cibber, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, Garrick, and Mrs. Fraisi, the singer, whose fine, expansive person and expensive dress made an important appearance in the walks.
Then the trees, or groups of them, the ponds, the little dells, the piquant ‘come and see what I can show you’ eminences! The old, solid, red or brown brick mansions; that speak of ‘successful commercial enterprise, and its sequel of splendid wealth.’
And, better still, in the shadow of an old lane, an early Georgian house of ruddy brick, unfaded by centuries of storm and sunshine, with a white gallery running round it like a ruff, and a lovely oriel looking to the sunsets.[162] Then the avenues that have some way got adrift from the homes they once led to, and are left stranded on the Heath, and the sweet, tree-shaded lanes; but these are, alas! for the most part lost to us, like the woods, the site of a once-great gathering of them, that had a history before the Conquest, though the history is lost to us, like the concluding chapters of Livy.
The oldest inhabitant of Hampstead will tell you that he does not know the whole of it, and a workman once informed the writer that he had daily crossed the Heath to his employment for many years, but he believed that he had scarcely ever found his way across it or back by precisely the same path. Undoubtedly, Hampstead has the merit of infinite variety, and the charm of compelling those who know it to desire a return to it with great longing. Even the separate districts into which it is now nominally divided have a distinctive character of their own, and West End is no more like Frognal than South End is like North End or Church Row.
