It was with the hope of alluring a portion of this company, and the expected crowds which the opening of the North London Railway promised, that the East Heath Tavern intruded its gaunt ugliness upon this peaceful spot, a speculation that ultimately failed.
As the only place on Hampstead Heath outside the taverns where in the forties and fifties a cup of tea could be had, or hungry folk find refreshment for their children or themselves, the Vale of Health was well known and appreciated. But its higher claims to be regarded and sought out and visited, I think, as a rule, the general inhabitants of the town of Hampstead had forgotten or ignored.
Neither William Howitt, Baines, nor a writer in the Bookman—who in 1893, 1894, and 1895 contributed some notices of Hampstead to that publication—appears to have known anything decided of the whereabouts of Leigh Hunt’s cottage, otherwise than that it was situated in the Vale of Health. The desire on all sides appears to have been to furnish the poet with a more important habitation than he himself tells us he occupied.
In or about 1855-56, it was believed that Vale Lodge, then the hospitable home of the talented writers of ‘The Wife’s Secret’[183] and ‘Ingomar,’ was the veritable house in which the poet had resided, and in one of the rooms of which Keats had composed the first verses of ‘Endymion.’
There is lying before me a note from a lady since closely connected with Hampstead, in which she writes:
‘M. asks me to say that she finds Leigh Hunt and Douglas Jerrold both lived in Mr. Lovell’s present house in the Vale of Health.’
In a series of sketchy, ill-considered papers—the very memory of which makes my ears tingle—I helped to give currency to this belief, but subsequently, on reading the letters of Leigh Hunt, and the literary recollections of his friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, I found, both from description and allusion, that Vale Lodge could not possibly be the ‘little packing-case, by courtesy called a house,’ which Leigh Hunt himself describes as his home at Hampstead, where he had gone for the sake of his ‘health, and his old walks in the fields.’
It seemed a case for the ‘oldest inhabitant,’ and I was fortunately referred to Mr. Paxon, of High Street, rate collector, etc., as his father had been before him. An old and ailing man, but intelligent, courteous, and communicative, he at once gave me the information I sought for, and was at pains to point out the white, weather-boarded cottage where, when a lad, as his father’s clerk, he had often delivered the rate-papers to Mr. or Mrs. Hunt, whom he well remembered, and their children also.
Even then the cottages—a row of four, if I remember aright—their prospect bounded by the margin of what is now the Spaniards Road, with a space of unspoiled sward before them, coming down to the garden rails, had an air of mild gentility, the effect, probably, of their retired situation, and the cared-for little garden plots before them, not much bigger than an old sea-captain’s bandanna handkerchief, and quite as flowery. Some resident had named the one Leigh Hunt had tenanted Rose Cottage. It had then a little green trellised veranda smothered in roses and scented clematis above the French window that opened on the garden.
My informant told me that Lord Byron had at one time lodged in another of these cottages, and had written with a diamond on a pane of one of the windows two lines which afterwards appeared in ‘Childe Harold.’ The pane existed in his time, but had either been broken, or cut out and removed. This was before Leigh Hunt’s residence there.