Quite close to Lauderdale House, in a cottage that was pulled down in 1869, lived the poet-patriot Andrew Marvell, who was the friend of Milton and the bitter enemy of his fair neighbour Nell Gwynn, who tried in vain to soften his animosity. Opposite to Marvell's cottage, in Cromwell House, now a branch of the Ormond Street Children's Hospital, resided General Ireton and his wife Bridget, the daughter of the Protector; and a little higher up, in what is now called the Bank, was Arundel House, the seat of the Earls of Arundel, supposed to have been at one time the residence of Sir Thomas Cornwallis, and to have been visited by Queen Elizabeth in 1589 and James I. in 1604. It is, however, more famous as having been the death-place of Francis Bacon, who expired in it in 1626, his end having been hastened, it is popularly believed, through an experiment he tried on his way from London with a view to finding out whether flesh could be preserved in snow.
The courageous William Prynne, who was so cruelly maltreated on 30th June 1637, and his fellow-sufferers for conscience' sake, Dr. Bastwick and the Rev. Henry Burton, were often at Highgate; to the house of Sir Thomas Abney, Dr. Watts came more than once; and the famous Jacobite prelate, Bishop Atterbury, was the frequent guest of his brother Dr. Atterbury, when the latter was minister of Highgate chapel. In a house on the Green lived and died Dr. Henry Sacheverel, the leader of the Tory party in the struggle of 1709, and the intimate friend of Addison. Sir Richard Baker, author of the Chronicles of England, who died in the Fleet Prison in great poverty in 1645, wrote much of his valuable work in a house on the Hill. The famous Calvinistic Methodist, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who chose the eloquent preacher Whitefield as one of her favourite chaplains, resided for some time in Highgate; and Church House on the Green was long the home of Sir John Hawkins, the author of the Standard History of Music, who used to drive to London every day in a coach and four.
Hogarth, whilst he was apprentice to a silversmith, was fond of going to the still standing but much altered Flask Inn, outside which the Whitsun morris-dancers used to foot it merrily for the 'honour of Holloway,' as described in the popular comedy Jack Dunn's Entertainment, first published in 1601. The great painter is said to have delighted in making sketches of the frequenters of the bar at the Flask Inn, especially of the tipsy brawlers, whose distorted grimaces he hit off to the life. At another well-known hostelry, the Bull Inn, on the Great North Road, looking down upon Finchley, George Morland, an artist of a very different type to Hogarth, was a familiar figure, for he found plenty of congenial subjects near by, and was on friendly terms with the drivers of all the stage-coaches that halted at the tavern. He used, it is said, to settle his score with mine host with sketches which, if they could now be traced, would be worth as many hundreds of pounds as shillings they then represented.
Occupying a commanding position on the west of the Green was the stately mansion Dorchester House, the seat of Henry, Marquis of Dorchester, from whom it was purchased in the reign of Charles II. by the eccentric philanthropist William Blake, who turned it into a school that ceased to exist in 1688. The mansion, after various vicissitudes, was pulled down; and in one of the houses, now No. 3 The Grove, that were built on its site, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived as the paying-guest of a surgeon named Gilman for nineteen years. There he was often visited by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Henry Crabb Robinson, Edward Irving, Mr. and Mrs. Cowden Clarke—the latter of whom has eloquently described her stay with the poet in her charming book, My Long Life—and Thomas Carlyle, who dwelt enthusiastically on the glorious view from the windows of the house, that is still, by the way, much what it was in Coleridge's time.
The parish church of Highgate, in which there is a tablet with a long inscription to the memory of Coleridge, and part of the cemetery occupy the site of the mansion-house built in 1694 by Sir William Ashurst, then Lord Mayor of London, and the villas of the present Fitzroy Park replace a fine old house erected in 1780 by Lord Southampton, and named after him. In one of the new houses on this beautiful estate lived the well-known sanitary reformer Dr. Southwood Smith, and near to the Park is Dufferin Lodge, the seat of Lord Dufferin, that was the maiden home of the eloquent writer, the Honourable Mrs. Norton, grand-daughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
In a little house known as the Hermitage, on West Hill, where a modern terrace now stands, and opposite to which there used to be an ash-tree popularly supposed to have been planted by Nelson when he was a boy, dwelt the notorious gambler Sir Wallis Porter, who was often joined there by the Prince Regent; and it was in it that the forger Henry Fauntleroy is said to have long lain hidden from the officers of the law in search of him. In Millfield Lane, and in the charming little Ivy Cottage, now enlarged and known as Brookfield House, the famous comedian, Charles Mathews, dwelt for many years. Millfield Cottage, next door to it, was for a time a favourite retreat of John Ruskin, and in the same lane, as related by Leigh Hunt in his Lord Byron and his Contemporaries, John Keats presented his brother poet with a volume of his poems, the first of many generous gifts.
West Hill, Highgate, is associated with several interesting memories. It was on it that Queen Victoria, in the year after her accession, was saved from what might have been a very serious accident by the landlord of the neighbouring Fox and Crown Inn, who arrested the frightened horses of the royal carriage, at the risk of his own life, as they were dashing down the steep descent. In West Hill Lodge the poets William and Mary Howitt lived and worked for several years, and not far from their old home is Holly Lodge, once the residence of the Duchess of St. Albans, and long the home of the generous and hospitable Baroness Burdett-Coutts, a worthy successor of her aristocratic predecessor, who built in Swain's Lane hard by a group of model cottages known as Holly Village.
In the picturesque cottage opposite to the chief entrance to the grounds of Holly Lodge the philanthropist Judge Payne died in 1870; David Williams, founder of the Royal Literary Fund, and Dr. Rochemond Barbauld, husband of the authoress, were at different times ministers of the Presbyterian chapel in Southwood Lane; and on the site of the once notorious Black Dog Tavern, on the hill going down to Holloway, are the chapel and home of the Passionist Fathers, from which, instead of the ribald songs of drunken revellers, perpetual prayers now go up for the restoration of England to the mother church of Rome.
Hornsey