Madame Piozzi.
If we take the Finchley Road back, we can make our way by Cricklewood to Child’s Hill Lane, and so back to the West Heath. There were in 1859 two or three good houses to the left of the road, with large, newly-enclosed grounds, but a few years later this portion of the Finchley Road was the least interesting and the most vitiated place on the skirts of Hampstead. The melancholy attempt to raise good houses on either side appeared to have been blighted by the unwholesome airs arising from the ill-drained and already-crowded suburb of Child’s Hill lying in the bottom to the right. Here various businesses the reverse of sanitary were carried on, the vile smells from which in hot weather, even at a considerable distance, made the inhaling of them dangerous, and occasioned a sort of local fever, from which it was said the neighbourhood was seldom free.
It was a relief, when leaving the sight of coal-yards covering what had been delightful meadows only a few years ago, and the useful, but certainly unpicturesque, railway-station to the right, to turn the corner by a semi-rural hostel at Cricklewood, and a row of village shops, and, mounting the slope, to enter what was quite recently a deep-hedged country lane, into which, according to the exploded theory of my antiquarian friend, the old Roman road over Hampstead Heath struck down by way of Cricklewood to Hendon. We pass the Hermitage, the temporary summer home of many well-known artists, and two or three cottages. The road, in places still fringed with trees, suggesting the shady way it must have been in olden time, ends at the spot that Platt’s Lane brought us to, within a short distance of West Heath.
Had we desired a longer walk on the Finchley Road, we might have found our way back through a field-gate a little to the east of Platt’s Lane, and of the path I have already described, leading to a gate opening into Oak Hill Fields at New West End, a region of rich grass fields, the quality of which recommended the purchase of 14 acres of meadow-land at Child’s Hill to the trustees of the Campden Charity, with which they joined the bequest of an unnamed but eccentric gentlewoman who left the parish £40 for the purpose of distributing among the inhabitants of Hampstead, rich and poor, halfpenny loaves (cross-buns, probably) on the morning of Good Friday annually.
If we follow the path, we find ourselves in the midst of a scene of pastoral beauty still unspoiled. Cattle, such as Sidney Cooper loves to paint, sleek and dappled, were, when I last saw it, placidly cropping mouthfuls of juicy grasses, or lying about on the slope of the upland field, lazily chewing the cud. In the hedgerows oak-trees, some of them hollow with age, and others young and verdant, appeared scattered over the face of the hill, which takes its name from the numbers of them once growing there. It was a walk for summer mornings and summer evenings—peaceful, sequestered, lovely—a walk that many a poet had trodden, and one in which many an artist besides Landseer had found inspiration and charming subjects. The hedgerows still sheltered their indigenous wild-flowers; hawthorn and elder, wild rose and woodbine, beautified the hedges in their several seasons, and though it felt and looked far away from the town, a very short walk to the gate or stile led to the main road, and past Oak Hill House, and Oak Hill Lodge, to the junction of Frognal Rise with Branch Hill.
We may either follow the latter road to the West Heath, or strike into the road past Lower Terrace, and come out between the enclosure of the Hampstead Waterworks and the walls of Mrs. Johnstone’s premises, at the angle of which, railed in, stands a fine old elm,[180] memorable as Irving’s Elm, under the shade of which some of the old inhabitants of Hampstead may remember to have seen the preacher of the ‘unknown tongue’ take his stand, and with vehement language and gesture address a crowd half curious, half eager to listen to his passionate pleadings or fierce denunciations.[181]
It is curious that Edward Irving, like Whitfield, was remarkable for a fearful squint. The Edinburgh Review, with a cruelty not unusual in its criticisms, attacked his appearance, actions, tones, gesticulation, and pronunciation, and stated that he thundered forth a growling falsetto, and ‘draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.’ It describes his violent contortions of countenance, and winds up by asserting that there had never been such a tossing of brawny arms, and such a lowering of bushy eyebrows performed ‘to so little purpose.’ But the critic adds that, ‘were he to dispense with his absurd, fitful, inappropriate vehemence, and eternal straining after singularity in the most minute points, he might become a rational and respectable minister of the Gospel.’
Turning back a few yards to Branch Hill, a road runs off at an angle with the main road past Lower Terrace, at No. 2 of which Constable, with his ‘placid companion’ and their little ones, had lodgings in 1821, and takes us out by the reservoir of the Hampstead Waterworks upon the Heath.
By making a little détour to the left, in front of Upper Terrace, and taking advantage of an opening between the houses, we find ourselves in the Judges’ Walk, or Prospect Terrace, as at one time modern Hampstead was inclined to call it, forgetting the archæological interest attached to the old name, and find ourselves face to face with a surprise of prospective beauty—a view so wide in extent, so rich in woodland scenery, rolling on over the Hertfordshire hills to the right, and all between a wide expanse of fertile country, that in all England there is scarcely a finer woodland and pastoral view. The trees and houses to the left shut out the sight of Harrow, and the glittering waters of the Kingsbury reservoir are no longer seen; but looking to the right, the view is charming, and to witness a sunset from this eminence is worth, on a fine summer’s day, a pilgrimage to Hampstead.