She calls Mrs. Inchbald a charming writer, and says that Miss Edgeworth has just come to town. In October, 1826, she writes that Hampstead is almost a desert, ‘the Earls away, Mrs. Greaves away, the Misses Baillie not expected till to-morrow.’[163]
In Augustus Hare’s ‘Memorials of the Gurneys of Earlham,’ we get another peep of society at Hill House in 1830, in a letter of J. G. Gurney, who there first met Dr. Chalmers:
‘I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Chalmers at Hill House, Hampstead. We walked in the garden ... at dinner an interesting party. Sumner, Bishop of Chester, Dr. Lushington, Buxton (Sir Fowell), and my sister, Elizabeth Fry.[164] In the evening Joanna Baillie joined our party. Next morning my brother Samuel Hoare took Dr. Chalmers and me to Wilberforce’s at Highwood, beyond Hendon (Mill Hill). Our morning passed delightfully; a stream of conversation flowed between ourselves and the ever-lively Wilberforce. I have seldom observed a more amazing contrast than between Chalmers and Wilberforce. Chalmers is stout and erect; Wilberforce minute and singularly twisted. Chalmers, both in body and mind, moves with a deliberate step; Wilberforce flies about with astonishing activity, while his mind flits from object to object with astonishing versatility. Chalmers is like a good-tempered lion; Wilberforce like a bee, and, except when fairly asleep, is never latent.’
These extracts afford an interesting glance at persons and associations connected with the Hoare family and Hill House. Earlier in the century we might have met Hannah More, Young of the ‘Night Thoughts,’ Mrs. Barbauld, and subsequently the banker-poet, Rogers, Coleridge and many more of the fraternity of letters.
To the right of Hill House lay a little bit of wooded ground, part of the original Wildwood Grove,[165] through which a path running diagonally from the road led into one of the avenues for which Hampstead is remarkable, avenues that, like Coleridge’s discourses, to those who could not understand them, ‘start from no premises, and arrive at no definite conclusion,’ though houses have occasionally been adapted to them, like Flitcroft’s Villa, at the end of the fine grove of lime-trees between Branch Hill and Frognal. Wildwood Avenue, as it is called, consists of a row of horse-chestnut-trees on one side, and a stately file of limes on the other. These, with their widely-spreading branches, through which the breeze sends restless lights and shadows, in contrast with the stronger forms and picturesquely-slanting trunks of the horse-chestnuts, which in some instances have taken a half-spiral direction in their efforts to strengthen themselves against the storms of many winters, have been a joy to successive generations of artists and unnumbered lovers of Nature.
Wildwood Avenue passes the entrance to North End House,[166] to which I am informed it originally led, and the trees go off by twos and threes upon a little triangular bit of greensward opposite to what used to be, perhaps is still, Wildwood Cottage, a plain, white, weather-boarded house, with red-tiled roof, a rustic rose-covered porch, and with a triplet of limes before it. Of this house there is something more to be said further on.
In coming down the avenue we pass on the right hand a paddock belonging to Mr. Gurney Hoare, where in bygone years stood a walnut-tree,[167] to the fruit of which by immemorial custom all the copyholders of Hampstead had a right, a privilege, I am told, that the boys used to take good care should not lapse for want of being annually maintained.
Returning to the road at the end of the wall enclosing the grounds of Hill House, we come out upon a bit of the Heath, with a straggling group of dark-stemmed, storm-stricken fir-trees at its farthest end, near the wall of Heath Lodge, locally known as the Eleven Sisters. Beneath the footpath on the edge of the Heath the main road is continued along a deep cutting past the back-front of North End House, now called Wildwood, a name to which, Mr. Howitt thinks, it had the original right. This cutting, said to be some centuries old, runs parallel with the gardens and grounds of North End House,[168] a name under which the place retains reminiscences of the saddest chapter in the life of England’s great statesman, Pitt, Earl of Chatham, which it would have been well for the interest of Hampstead to have retained. The house stands on a descending tongue of ground, running down, as we have said, between the old avenue and the North End Road, and is embowered in finely-grown trees. The garden runs up the ascent, and has an old, octagonal summer house of three stories at the upper end of it, which can be seen from the footpath on the Heath. This is still in a fair state of preservation.
Firs.