VABOUT WATLING STREET

True patriots all! for, be it understood,We left our country for our country’s good.

“Stop, thief! Stop, thief! A highwayman!” wasthe cry naturally raised by those who saw John Gilpin racing along the road, its most famed hero to the general reader. There appears, indeed, some obscurity as to the first stage taken by the worthy linen-draper on his untamed steed. The text distinctly states that he passed through ‘merry Islington‘; but commentators differ as to whether by Aldersgate Street he gained the Essex Road, and thence struck across the line of the Green Lanes, or more directly attained the Kingsland Road, which seems his shortest line from Cheapside, but would soon bring him into the parish of Stoke Newington, a name perhaps omitted by poetic license as more intractable to the metre.

We can confidently follow his race beyond where the Seven Sisters Road comes in from Finsbury Park. Were the seven sisters of Tottenham those seven daughters who, with such comically lugubrious looks, kneel in a diminishing row along the Barkham monument in its Parish Church? The received legend makes them seven elms, whose successors stand railed in on the green at Seven Sisters Corner. From this landmark we hold up the road to another corner, where has been restored Tottenham High Cross, the name of which calls to mind shades as abiding as John Gilpin’s. It was from Tottenham that Piscator and his friend set out to take their “morning draught” at the “Thatched House” of Hoddesdon, after a walk of over a dozen miles. It may have been in the garden of the “Swan” here that Izaak Walton in the flesh could stroll under a “honeysuckle hedge” and rest “ina sweet shady arbour,” rural amenities now much to seek about the Tottenham highroad, though in entering this parish it crossed the invisible boundary of London. By Tottenham Hale one might now turn down to the Lea, that ripples so sweetly through Walton’s seventeenth-century Arcadia; but one had better not.

We have a vision of our own,Ah! why should we undo it?

On the other side of Tottenham’s spacious Broadway, towards Hornsey, we might still find a remnant of green fields shrinking like thepeau de chagrinin Balzac’s romance. A height between this road and the Green Lanes has of late been laid out as a pretty park, overlooking the meadows of the Muswell Brook—mocked with thealiasof Moselle—where the London County Council proposes to plant a new town of working men’s dwellings. Socially, Tottenham has not much to boast of, Stamford Hill perhaps being its only purlieu on visiting terms with the West End. A century ago it had come down to snug and sober respectability, when it was much affected by Quakers and other Dissenters, and such names as Bernard Barton and John Williams, the missionary, marked its eminent natives. Still, its main thoroughfare wears a certain aspect of broad-brimmed sobriety and unpretentious comfort. But time was when this village rang with the stir of feudal chivalry, even before that burlesque “Tournament of Tottenham,” sung by an English Cervantes of so early date that a quotationwould need a glossary. To lists set up beside Tottenham highway came “all the men of Islington, of Highgate, and of Hackney,” their weapons flails, their shields baskets, their armour sheep-skins; then Perkin the potter, “with doughtiness of dent,” carried away the prize, the hand of the Reeve’s daughter Tib, along with which went such trophies as a grey mare, a spotted sow, and a brood-hen. The fair lady was forthwith led to church, the beaten champions in her train, and rancour was drowned in a wedding-feast that lasted “all the long day” for those eupeptic heroes.

About the church can be traced Tottenham’s nucleus of antiquity. When, on the right hand of the main road, we have passed the Sanchez Almshouses, founded by a Spanish confectioner who came to England with King Philip, a far from bonny opening named Scotland Green hints how this was once a royal manor, passing into the lordship of the Scottish Kings, and held in turn by the rivals Bruce and Baliol. The Bruces had a keep here, still extant in a modernized form. Bruce Castle became a school carried on by the Hill family, one of whom, after an experiment at educational reform noted in its day, rose to wider fame as the victorious champion of penny postage. The ivied mansion, no more like a school than a castle, housed young gentlemen till not long ago; but, with its pleasant grounds, it has now been turned into a public resort.

At the north-west corner of this park stands Tottenham Church, half hid among trees that soften its incongruity,ranging from the old flint tower to the new brick chancel. One might well look in here for a sight of the Barkham and the Candeler monuments, each in its way an imposing specimen of such memorials in Stuart days, set in dim religious light by a rich show of coloured glass. A daughter of the Ettrick shepherd is buried, so far from her birthplace, in what Besant described as “a very good churchyard, full of interesting monuments of unknown people; and in the day-time you might wander there for a long time and learn quantities of history just hinted at in the bald, disjointed way common to tombstones. You might, I say, under happier conditions, but you cannot, because they have stuck up rows of spiky iron railings beside the path, so that no moralist, unless he have very long legs, shall ever be permitted to get any good out of the churchyard at all.”

Into the neighbour parish Tottenham merges without a break in what was “all one continued street” so far back as Defoe’s time. About half a mile beyond the latitude of the church, where the road swerves slightly to the right, a house on the left side is marked “No. 1, Edmonton.” The next landmark here is the “Bell,” with its fresco of that galloping citizen, cloak, hat, and wig flying in the air, by which this house claims connection with his wild career; but it has more than once been rebuilt, and may not occupy the site of the original resort for Cockney trippers, that would probably be farther on, towards the original village. The “Wash of Edmonton” seems anotherdoubtful point. No such obstruction is now found on the road, which in Tottenham was crossed by the Muswell or Moselle Brook, and beyond the “Bell” passes over the large Pymmes Brook, flowing from East Barnet, then farther on the Salmon Brook, from Enfield. This last is said to have been known as the Wash, a title repeated in the Wash of Enfield and of Cheshunt; but now that the streams have long been bridged over, the oldest inhabitants are not in one tale as to which was the ford splashed about by our Cockney Mazeppa

Just like unto a trundling mopOr a wild goose at play.

The hedges and stiles that bordered the road in Cowper’s day have vanished like its turnpike gates. Upper Edmonton in turn imperceptibly becomes Lower Edmonton, the old village now strung to London by leagues of houses. A long mile beyond the “Bell” is reached a fragment of Edmonton Green, where the poor “Witch of Edmonton” was burned in 1621. We may here desert the road, and its trams running on to a gap of still-open fields which the builder threatens to close; then again the industrial outliers of Enfield will shadow it almost continuously to the edge of the county. Let us turn up, by the Green and the station, to Edmonton Church, notable for its traditions of Archbishop Tillotson, and of another incumbent, Tate, the rusty psalmist, also of that “Merry Devil of Edmonton” that played suchtricks here in Henry VII’s time, as for its joint memorial to Lamb and Cowper. Keats, as apprenticed to an Edmonton surgeon, is likewise commemorated along with Lamb by medallions in the public library.

The greenest memory of this parish and the next is Charles Lamb’s, who ended his days at Edmonton in a little house on the way up to the church. It was occupied, when I last passed it, by a registrar of births, deaths and marriages, a tenancy to “arride” that very human spirit. No lover of literature will visit Edmonton without seeking out his and his sister’s grave, which may be found by going on from the west end of the church to the tiny almshouses on the graveyard’s further side, and there turning left on a railed path. About half-way along this, on the right side, overshadowed by a more pretentious tomb, a modest slab shows the epitaph by Gary, the translator of Dante—Wordsworth’s tribute being rejected as long enough to fill a whole row of tombstones.

A path from the churchyard, bending on to the right by an old windmill, towards the New River and the Green Lanes, shows how much Edmonton has lost the rural charms it may have had when Lamb came to die here. For several years his home had been in the adjacent parish of Enfield, to whose hilly and shady beauties let us now set our face. Not that rural beauties appear to have had enduring attraction for Elia, who took any beer-shop as the goal of his restless walks, which also by choice were turned towards his familiar London. “To him the tide of human life

EDMONTON CHURCHEDMONTON CHURCH

that flowed through Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill was worth all the Wyes and Yarrows in the universe; there were, to his thinking, no Green Lanes to compare with Fetter Lane or St. Bride’s, no Garden like Covent Garden.” So says his friend P. G. Patmore, who could only guess at unselfish regard for his sister’s health as the cause of that seclusion.

When Lamb’s friends visited him at Enfield, they were sometimes in the way of taking the hourly Edmonton stage, and walking the two miles on. Another coach ran direct to Enfield, by which Henry Crabb Robinson was two and a half hours on the way, who again tramped it in little more than three hours. The London theatres were the loadstone that drew young Charles Cowden Clarke, walking both ways by what could then be called the quiet Green Lanes, now laid with an electric tram-line. Green lanes are a frequent feature of Middlesex scenery; but these Green Lanespar excellencecan no longer be held typical, as they run through the crowded homes of Stoke Newington and Hornsey, tantalizing a romantic soul with such names as Mount Pleasant and Wood Green. Yet this lively highroad has still some patches of its greens to show; some stretches of private grounds turned into public demesnes, like Clissold Park and Finsbury Park; some pleasant glimpses of the fenced New River, in Lamb’s youth still open to the holiday explorations of his school-fellows. Beyond Palmer’s Green it grows more truly rural, the Green Lanes winding up to Enfield in a manner not unworthy oftheir name, with many tempting by-ways towards the Great Eastern Railway line on the right and the Great Northern Railway on the left, that would keep wanderers from going too far astray.

But the pleasantest way of reaching Enfield on foot is from the south-west side, where Pan still haunts fragments of the Chase. For this route one can turn off the Great North Road near its junction with the Finchley Road, making by Colney Hatch to Southgate, the birthplace of Leigh Hunt, who might still call this “a prime specimen of Middlesex” in its charms of “trees and meadows, of greenery and nestling cottages.” Southgate Green also boasts the Walkers, a family of cricketers recorded in a bigger book than has been written about Leigh Hunt. Another way to it is from Bounds Green, leaving the present border-line of suburbia to cross the Pymmes Brook for the fine elm avenue of Broomfield Park, now a public playground, through which is reached the avenue-like road from Palmer’s Green to Southgate Green.

The builder has made havoc here with Lamb’s “unfrequentedest Blackberry paths that ever concealed their coy bunches from a truant citizen.” But, beside the “Cherry Tree” on Southgate Green, one can take a footway leading into a road from the Green Lanes, along which road to the left, then turning, right, round the next corner, one finds a woodland path which makes one of the most sylvan walks so near London. Nearly a mile of it lead out upon the small Green of Winchmore Hill, where a snug old village forms the core ofa settlement spread loosely along its radiating roads. We are here a little to the west of the Green Lanes, and about two miles from the further line of road through Edmonton. Beyond the Green, after neglecting the turn to Winchmore Hill Station, the pedestrian crooks to the right over a railway-bridge, then presently on the left side of the road his path goes off almost straight to Enfield, across a road, through a market orchard, over a brook, up the slope of the Old Park, along the thickly-shaded bank of the New River, and by the Town Park, to the tongue of open sward opening between the older part of the town, and the west-end quarter known as Bycullah Park, built upon what was once a racecourse.

High-set Enfield turns its best face to the west, where travellers from Barnet are beaconed by a tall white spire rising over red roofs half hidden in swelling greenery. This spire does not mark the Parish Church, whose tower stands by the Market Place, where the Green Lanes road crosses that from Barnet to Ponder’s End, close to the Great Eastern Railway station, distinguished as “Enfield Town.” The Great Northern Railway branch station, towards the west end, which will now cease to be a terminus, is known as “Enfield.” This name, indeed, is widely scattered, the Hertford road, to the east, being lined for two or three miles with the huge hamlets of Enfield Highway, Enfield Wash, and Enfield Lock. But the town of Enfield, linked to these offshoots only by a name, still preserves much of its spacious amenity, from the dayswhen it was a clearing in the forest turned into a royal chase. The Old Park, on the south side, has not lost its tradition of dignity as precinct of a Tudor palace, while the wider bounds of the hunting-ground, disforested and enclosed under George III., have shrunk into smaller parks about mansions whose modest title of Lodge recalls their origin, when only three such houses stood in a circuit of two dozen miles, the Chase bounds stretching from Southgate to the northern edge of Middlesex. The name of the Old Palace is fondly cherished for a remnant of building used till the other day as the Post-Office, at the present moment proclaimed “to let.” In front this looks across the Market Place to the tower of the Church, the interior of which gains roomy effect from its prolonged aisles and sunken floor; and it has monuments to show, the most remarkable being Lady Tiptoft’s ancient altar-tomb, and the family group of effigies commemorating a Lord Mayor of Charles I’s. time.

Beside this church are the new buildings of the Grammar School, which under Charles II. occupied the Old Palace, when its master was Dr. Uvedale, the botanist, by whom is said to have been planted the first cedar in England, still flourishing royally at the back of this building. A fruitful private seminary is now ill-represented by the Great Eastern station, the fine façade of the old building having in part been removed to South Kensington Museum as a noble specimen of moulded brickwork. Wren may have been the architect of a mansion which appears to have

ENFIELDENFIELD

been occupied by Isaac Disraeli, till he removed to London, just in time to make the future Prime Minister no native of Enfield. The house then became a school kept by Charles Cowden Clarke’s father, with John Keats as its most illustrious pupil, who, after his apprenticeship at Edmonton, used to walk over to borrow books from his old teacher. Another school in the vicinity could boast two scholars of very different renown, Captain Marryat, and Babbage, the calculating boy, of whom it is remembered that he would get up in the small hours to study on the sly, whereas the future naval novelist was keen rather for play, and distinguished himself by running away from frequent scrapes and floggings, being once captured “in the horse-pond at Edmonton.” Sir Ralph Abercromby also was an Enfield schoolboy, in days when the place made such a choice retreat from London as now is Tunbridge Wells or Leith Hill, and it can look back to older days when for wealth and dignity it held up its head above Kensington.

The younger Clarke’sRecollections of Writersare thick set with names not yet forgotten, familiar to him when his father on their walks taught the boy to plant acorns that may now be stately trees. He knew a grandfather of Bulwer Lytton and a nephew of Gilbert White. He remembered a visit from George Dyer, his father’s fellow-usher and rival in love at Northampton, whose name has been “pickled and preserved in humour” by his friend Lamb. From the school garden he sent a weekly basket of flowers, fruit,and vegetables to comfort Leigh Hunt’s imprisonment. He met Major Cartwright, the doughty Radical, then living at Enfield. There were other notabilities of the neighbourhood with whom the family of a liberal-minded schoolmaster might not come much in contact, ex-Lord Mayors, knights, and professional veterans. Abernethy, the rough-tongued surgeon, came here to die, and has a tablet in the church. At an earlier date Lord George Gordon, the Protestant firebrand, had lived hereabouts. Gough, the antiquary, is another name in a long list of notable residents that might be continued down to Walter Pater, whose childhood was spent on Chase side; and to its chequered shades, perhaps, he owed “many tones of sentiment afterwards customary with him, certain inward lights under which they most naturally presented themselves to him.”

Tom Hood for a time had his home at Winchmore Hill, and in Hone’sTable Book(1827) there is a caricature by him of Mary Lamb stuck fast on one of the high stiles common about Enfield and Edmonton. This is accompanied by a letter signed “Sojourner at Enfield,” which, I must confess, made me an accomplice in deceiving readers of my guide,Around London. Till my eyes were opened by Mr. E. V. Lucas’s edition of Lamb, I had not recognised this communication as one of Elia’s farcical fibs, with its grave attribution of the sketch “probably” to Romney, and its fragment “in the handwriting of Cowper,” going to show that the poet had designed a companionpiece to John Gilpin, which should deal with his wife’s adventures while hanging about the “Bell.”

Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly saidUnto her children three,“I’ll clamber o’er this style so high,And you climb after me.”But having climb’d unto the top,She could no further go,But sat, to every passer-byA spectacle and show;Who said, “Your spouse and you this dayBoth show your horsemanship;And if you stay till he comes back,Your horse will need no whip.”

Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly saidUnto her children three,“I’ll clamber o’er this style so high,And you climb after me.”

But having climb’d unto the top,She could no further go,But sat, to every passer-byA spectacle and show;

Who said, “Your spouse and you this dayBoth show your horsemanship;And if you stay till he comes back,Your horse will need no whip.”

The Clarkes had left their school before Charles Lamb settled definitely in “this vale of deliberate senectitude,” so we do not understand that he here found the model for hisNew Schoolmaster. Charles Cowden Clarke made his acquaintance at Ramsgate, and afterwards visited him at Enfield, where from 1827 to 1833 the brother and sister lived in two adjacent houses on Chase side, first as tenants, then as lodgers of an uncongenial family next door. Both these houses, standing in a somewhat altered state, are piously marked by tablets; but in my experience not every Enfielder knows where to find them, so the pilgrim stranger may be directed to the straggling green beside “my old New River,” on the way between the two stations; here he turns up the road marked “Clay Hill,” andmay look for his double shrine on the right-hand side just before reaching the spire of Christ Church. This part of Enfield, somewhat bevillaed in our time, must then have been close to the fringe of green by-ways of which Clarke speaks more lovingly than Lamb. One seldom knows how far to take seriously the whimsical humorist’s groans over the dullness of country life when fairly tried, nor his sighs for the “fresher air of London”; but there seems to be a vein of real feeling in such complaints as fill his letters from this exile—for instance, to Wordsworth:

O never let the lying poets be believed, who ‘tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean it not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers, but to have a little teazing image of a town about one, country folks that do not look like country folks, shops two yards square—half a dozen apples and two penn’orth of overlooked gingerbread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford Street, and, for the immortal book and print stalls, a circulating library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year’s Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not yet travel’d (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the Red Gauntlet!); to have a new plastered flat church, and to be wishing that it was but a Cathedral. The very blackguards here are degenerate. The topping gentry stockbrokers. The passengers too many to insure your quiet, or let you go about whistling, or gaping—too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping, thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. Among one’s books at one’s fire by candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one is not in the country; but with the light the green fields return, till I gaze and in a calenture can plunge myself into Saint Giles’s. O let no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocentoccupation, interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable! A garden was the primitive prison till man with promethean felicity and boldness luckily sinn’d himself out of it.

The writer of this was a man of moods, who, as his friend Coleridge has it:

PinedAnd hungered after Nature many a yearIn the great City pent.

Before leaving the India House, Lamb “had thought in a green old age (O green thought) to have retired to Ponder’s End—emblematic name, how beautiful!” No one now would choose a retirement at Ponder’s End, that industrial eastern neighbour of Enfield overshadowing the Lea Valley with its tall smoke-stacks and long rows of workmen’s homes. Yet just beyond the grimy hideousness of Ponder’s End Station, the bridge leading over to Chingford Marshes gives a peep of the Lea that by moonshine might still make a trysting-place for shepherds and milkmaids. Daylight dulls all memories of romance with smoke and mist; then the name of Green Street seems a mockery among those of the outlying Enfields that for miles blotch the Hertford road with their confluent eruption.

These quarters depend upon various industries planted along the Lea, the principal of them a national factory of death and destruction which, two generations ago, brought Enfield’s name into history with the riflesmade here. A century earlier the name of Enfield Wash flowed far and wide in public excitement over a puzzling story of crime, to stir, under George II., even more sensation in England than did the Tichborne case for our newspaper age. It was here that a servant-girl, Elizabeth Canning, professed to have been robbed and imprisoned by certain persons, one of them a gipsy woman, who, sentenced to be hanged, was saved by fresh evidence that convicted the accuser of perjury. In those days of rough-and-ready justice feeling ran strangely strong between partisans of the gipsy and of the servant, the latter’s cause being championed by mob violence, while dozens of books and pamphlets hotly discussed the trials spread out over more than a year. Banished to the American plantations, the dubious heroine took away a considerable sum collected by her sympathizers, and, thus famed and dowried, she made a good marriage in the colony, where her descendants may now be flourishing as New York bosses or Chicago pork-poisoners.

As hints of what this highway was then, among its bordering of monotonously mean streets stand here and there weather-worn cottages and broad-faced Georgian mansions, whose long windows overlooked John Gilpin’s race. When—the name of Enfield at last left behind—about eight miles from the boundary of London, the road has passed out of Middlesex, just before coming to Waltham Cross, on the right it has the gates of Waltham House. This was for years the home of Anthony Trollope, that energetic post-officeinspector, traveller, and fox-hunter, who in his spare time made himself the most voluminous author of a family which must have filled more shelves in the British Museum than any other, his own works better known to our fathers, as they may be to our sons, than they are to a generation greedy of spicier flavours in its literary fare.

A preserve of such good old houses is Baker Street, continuing the Green Lanes, which no more resembles that “long unlovely street” of London than its paradise of South African millionaires is like the Park Lane leading on to Tottenham Marshes. This Baker Street makes the pleasantest way north from Enfield, bordered by fine old trees and by the grounds of suburban mansions, more than one of them showing notable ironwork in its gates. A mile of such rustic gentility leads to Forty Hill, where we pass the grounds of Forty Hall, built by Inigo Jones, then those of Middleton Hall, named in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, cadet of a large Welsh family, who, like so many other gentle youths in his day, became a London apprentice and merchant, and won honour, if not wealth, by his great enterprise of bringing a water-supply to the capital in the New River.

This artificial water-course, a Pactolus to later share-holders though it ruined its constructor, makes more Arcadian appearances in the landscape than does the Lea, and bears itself with an air of long-established standing to belie its “assumption of eternal novity.” I know of no other canal that has got a poem all aboutit—The New River, by William Garbott, whose muse, indeed, flows at no high pressure:

FromBasonslarge, the water is conveyedBy Pipes, which thence into theTownare laid.Had I but Skill, how sweetly could I playUpon thyPipes, Sir Hugh, aRoundelay!

For miles out of London the New River is guarded from pollution like the sky at Naples, which has been said to be the only clean thing there, and that because no one can get at it. But higher up, near the Middlesex boundary, one may take a path along its banks as it winds from mansion to mansion, through woods and meadows where Izaak Walton might still love to linger.

And here we come among royal memories. Between Forty Hall and Middleton House stood Elsynge Hall, or Enfield House, in the New Park, where Elizabeth held her court, after spending some of her younger days at the Old Palace. The Maiden Bridge on the stream crossed by the road continuing Baker Street is taken for the scene of Walter Raleigh’s courtier-like offer of his cloak; no Enfield man, at least, will allow the legend to be located elsewhere. A mile further on, across the county border, we should skirt Theobald’s Park—pronouncedTibbald’s—once the princely seat of Elizabeth’s Lord Burleigh, to which James I. took such a fancy that he gave the Salisbury family Hatfield in exchange for it. The park was then ten miles in circuit, the gardens passed for the finest in England,and the house was a stately palace that stood till George III.‘s reign. It had many changes of owner, one, by the irony of fate, being last male descendant of Oliver Cromwell, who carried out a more sweeping exchange with his sovereign. The hunting of Enfield Chase made it a favourite abode with James, and here he died (1625) after nearly being drowned, three years earlier, by a fall from his horse that sent him head foremost into the frozen water of the New River, his boots only sticking up above the ice. Here also the timid King was put in danger from fire as well as water, for White Webbs House, a vanished neighbour of Forty Hall, appears to have been one of the hatching-places of the Gunpowder Plot.

Just within the Middlesex boundary, a road turning left from the well-timbered hamlet of Bull’s Cross leads by the modern mansion of White Webbs Wood in its charming park. In a short mile is reached the “King and Tinker,” an old inn offering a variety among the zoological signs of the neighbourhood—“Spotted Cow,” “Goat,” “Fallow Buck,” and such-like. This sign gives a local habitation and King James’ name to that oft-told tale of a sovereign too familiarly treated by an unsuspecting subject, miller, tanner, tinker, or what not, the first case on record being Alfred’s awkward dealings with a baking house-wife. Opposite the inn stands a little chapel of the Countess of Huntington’s Connection, which seems a natural growth here, since at Cheshunt, not far off, was the college set up by that denomination, removed to Cambridge only theother day. Between the chapel and the inn opens a most charming footway across White Webbs Park, coming out in the Clay Hill suburb of Enfield, a little to the east of the “Rose and Crown,” that boasts itself the scene of one of Dick Turpin’s adventures—his home, indeed, as it was kept by his grandfather.

For straying into Hertfordshire beside Theobald’s Park, one can find excuse in a famous Middlesex monument. Let Viator keep straight on from Bull’s Cross, till a leafy turn round the north side of the park leads him towards the rose-gardens of Waltham Cross. Here, if he have as many grey hairs as his present guide, he may suddenly start and rub his spectacles, when he comes upon the once-familiar arch of Temple Bar, set in the park enclosure, standing outpost sentry over Greater London, grey and massive as ever, and looking as if in the country air it would outlive that flighty griffin that has taken its place at the City boundary. On the other side of Theobald’s might be found a hint of its old neighbour, Charing Cross, for beside the highroad, at the turning off to Waltham Abbey, just outside Middlesex, has been restored a sumptuous Eleanor’s Cross, one of that series erected by Edward I. at each spot where his wife’s body rested on its way from Grantham to Charing.

Enfield does not turn its best face to the Lea Valley, but the stretch of parks and shady roads to the north of it makes one of the pleasantest corners of Middlesex. And if the pedestrian seek a green ramble back to town, I can put him upon one which will show part ofthe country not so much changed from the days of Lamb’s wanderings. Let him take the Barnet Road, past the Great Northern Railway station and the spired church, a little beyond which, where the road drops from a turning marked “Chase Ridings,” he looks out for a field-path going off to the left. Crossing a brook, it leads him into a bushy lane, past a group of hospital buildings and chimneys that make a landmark. When the suburban skirtings of Eversley Park are reached, turns of the road may be taken to the right, and guide-posts will keep one straight for a mile or so south-west till the north end of Southgate is reached at a joining of five ways. Here, from the road southward for Southgate Green, almost at once a path leads off to the right, by the backs of houses, along a wooded bank, over a meadow, and through a park till it reaches a road dropping down to cross the Pymmes Brook, beyond which is struck the way leading past East Barnet Church to Colney Hatch. A good mile or two to the west of this runs the tram-line of the Great North Road, on the further side of which we now pass to London’s north-western artery.

IThas been fondly held that Watling Street went out over Hampstead and Hendon, and the bit of the City bearing this name would fit in with such an opinion. But the sounder doctrine seems to be that the ancient way, made or improved as the Romans’ great North-Western Road, originally came up from the marshes at Westminster, where the name Horseferry Road tells a tale, and thence took the line of what is now Park Lane, till the building of London Bridge caused it to be diverted into the City. From the Marble Arch this route runs almost straight on to Edgware, and beyond, without much wavering, to the foot of the height on which stands St. Albans.

The Edgware Road is familiar to more Londoners than are aware of its antiquity. It is now too crowded with traffic to stir thoughts of bygone renown; but on one of the motor-buses that urge their wild career through Maida Vale and Kilburn, beyond Brondesbury making the arduous ascent of Shoot-Up Hill, a spur of the Hampstead heights, we can soon get out to the boundary of London County at Cricklewood. On theleft hand of the road here a square mile or so of new suburb has sprung up in the last few years, the best part of it being on an estate of All Souls’ College, whose Fellows must fatten in the body, while less lucky gownsmen are like to starve on agricultural depression. It is well to own property at some “Creek in the Wood” so near London; but when my own three acres of pasturage come to be allotted I have my eye on the fields about St. Martin’s or St. Paul’s.

The east side of the road here belongs to the Metropolitan borough of Hampstead. On the west we are in the Middlesex urban district of Willesden, that huge hobbledehoy suburb that as yet in part bears much the same relation to London proper as lignite does to coal; or it may be said to be in process of solidification—“half-baked” is a vulgar epithet on censorious tongues. In the lifetime of a generation this district has increased its population more than sevenfold, while, not to be behind its neighbours, it has set up a debt of nearly a million pounds. The large parish originally consisted of several scattered hamlets—Kilburn, Brondesbury, Cricklewood, Willesden Green, Harlesden, and Church End—which have now run together, though with gaps still shrinking every month. The Kilburn end, indeed, has long been firmly welded on to Paddington. Beside Willesden Green Station may be seen a bit of the original green; but if thereon Willesden should affect “county” airs, let her look back to the fate of Lisson Green and Lisson Grove. Between Kensal Rise and the PublicLibrary in Willesden High Road there is at present a deep, shaded hill lane, barred by a stile, where artists or poets might carry on their business undisturbed. In another year or two this will probably be overflowed from the adjacent brickworks, so as to become “Klondyke Avenue” or “Edward VII. Road.” Would that the builder had first swooped upon that dingy south-western edge, blighted by the smoke of engines and the language of bargees, where Browning may well have seen—

Something on the dismal flatCame to arrest my thoughts and change their train!

From the misnamed junction at Harlesden, the quarter of Willesden best known to railway travellers, there are still bits of footpath towards Church End, by Roundwood Park, swelling to an eminence that gives a good view of the neighbourhood. Willesden Church, standing in the remotest corner of the parish, had once a noted image of the Virgin, which brought many pilgrims to “Our Lady of Willesden”; and though it has suffered enlargement and restoration, it enshrines interesting monuments, brasses, and other relics of an antiquity that goes back to Norman times, beset by a show of later tombstones, among them that of Charles Reade the novelist.

The “Crown” at Cricklewood is the terminus of bus traffic on the high-road. Thence an electric tram, coming round from Willesden, spins out the straight road as far as Edgware, through a chequer of open spaces that are every day being filled up like a backgammonboard. On this road we may well hurry at tramway speed, looking for interest rather to either hand of it. As soon as we get out of what a year or so ago was the edge of building, where on the right stands a forbidding fortress of the Midland Railway, on the other side Dollis Hill Lane is about to be overshadowed by Dollis Hill Avenue. This leafy lane leads along the brow of Dollis Hill to Neasden, passing a house of Lord Aberdeen’s, more than once visited by the statesman in honour of whom its sloping grounds, now a public play-place for Willesden, have been named the Gladstone Park. Mark Twain for a time occupied the house, which has a fine view over the north-western suburbs. The word Dollis, recurring in Middlesex place-names, has been held as connected with “dole,” an old word for a mark of sharing or partition, replaced in our Prayer Book by “neighbour’s landmark”; but this is not a point on which pundits are agreed, and in many cases such names, the popular etymology of which is generally wrong, might turn out to come from an owner long forgotten.

From the back of Dollis Hill a footpath leads down to the “Welsh Harp,” the next point of note on the road. This tavern flourishes on the edge of what is the largest lake in Middlesex, or indeed in South-Eastern England, the Kingsbury Reservoir, popularly known as the Welsh Harp Water, a sheet more than a mile long, formed by damming the waters of the Brent and the Silk Brook, as a store for supplying the Regent’s Canal. Fishing, boating, and skating makeattractions for customers of the landlord, who in hard winters must coin ice into gold; and in summer there are the tea-garden dissipations of a popular Vauxhall. At the top, the artificial lake’s feeders are bridged by the road; at the bottom, the Brent is released from a dam not so large as that of the Nile at Assouan; then below, the once flowery banks of this stream seem as if blighted by the Metropolitan Railway works at Neasden.

Mr. Chadband might well rebuke the writer who should compare the Welsh Harp Water to Loch Katrine or Windermere; but there is some pretty scenery to be looked for about its lower end. One surprising feature here is Kingsbury Church, that, not 300 yards off a suburban road, stands among quiet meadows almost out of sight of any house. On a slight eminence, shaded by funereal evergreens set in a frame of hedgerow timber, its red roof makes a cheerful spot of colour, and the interior shows a refreshingly old-fashioned simplicity. So close to London, one might suppose it a secluded country church, but for the predominance of elegant tombstones betraying its congregation as no mere villagers. The original structure has been claimed as Anglo-Saxon. Some antiquarian spectacles make out here the site of a Roman camp; while there seems better reason to take thisKing’s burghas the first Saxon settlement in Middlesex, in a sense the nucleus of modern London, when the place may have been more populous than it is to-day, but for itsannexeNeasden. The

HENDONHENDON

village of Kingsbury has drifted nearly a mile to the north, where it lies stranded about its “Green Man,” past which a by-way from Harrow leads into the Edgware Road at the hamlet called the Hyde. Hyde House Farm here, a little off the highway, is understood to have given a country retreat to Goldsmith, who is heard of as lodging at other points on the Edgware Road.

The mile or so’s breadth of country stretching two or three miles back from the Edgware Road, between Kingsbury and Harrow, makes an extraordinary vacuum in the teeming life of Greater London. For reasons based on a heavy clay soil, it does not lend itself to builders’ designs. Of late a few villas have straggled on to the lanes between Kingsbury and its lonely church; else few but scattered farm-buildings break this green expanse, a preserve of real rurality, traversed by lanes and hedgerow paths giving solitary ways across brooks and meadows, northward to Edgware, westward to Harrow, so little trodden that blackberries can grow ripe here within sound of the Metropolitan Railway whistles, and the plainest hint of London’s close neighbourhood is a crop of notices to trespassers. On the north side lurk two isolation hospitals; in the centre, towards Harrow, come the hamlets of Preston and Kenton; on the south, at the foot of a bold hill-swell towards Wembley, lie the buildings of Uxendon Farm, where poor Anthony Babington was captured to answer for his abortive conspiracy. Horseflesh seems to thrive on these fat pastures. Though Kingsbury Races havebeen well abolished, there are stud paddocks on the Wembley side, as well as great army stables near the Edgware Road; and it was somewhere hereabouts, if one be not mistaken, that Mr. Soapey Sponge came to equip himself for his sporting campaign.

The other side of the Edgware Road is far better populated, for, at the “New” Welsh Harp, above the “Old” one, it touches the growth of Hendon, stretching and straggling across almost to the Finchley Road. Our tram-line passes close to Hendon Station, a mile below the row of old almshouses where one turns aside to the Church of which Hampstead’s was once a chapelry. This, with its monuments of dignity, has the air of a true village church, and its shady churchyard overlooks green slopes. Beyond Church End comes a knot of lanes, bordered by new and old houses, one of which belonged to David Garrick. But elsewhere Hendon has grown too much “up to date,” and its outskirts are beset by huge piles of public buildings, among them the new newspaper depot of the British Museum Library. In the southern quarter, dropping to the Brent, one might think oneself back in London; while to the north greedy tongues of brick still stretch out over green fields, on which Anthony Trollope’s readers may remember how Polly Kneefit was wooed and won.

But there are some pleasant field-walks left about Hendon, and as our tram for the next two or three miles will show us little beside workhouse palaces and the like, the reader may as well be taken on towardsEdgware by a circuitous route across country. About two miles north of the Hendon heights another ridge is crowned by the more eminent features of Mill Hill. For this one may make by two paths starting from Hendon Churchyard, on either side of a line of villas projecting northwards. The field-path on the west side is to be preferred for its open view on the heights of Harrow and Stanmore. After a mile it comes into a road, that bridges the Great Northern Railway branch to Edgware, and presently turns up an avenued way, from the top of which a path mounts over park-like meadows with fine backward prospects, leading into Mill Hill opposite its “King’s Head.” If here one turned right as far as the “Adam and Eve,” beside it one could come back to Hendon by the other path above mentioned, passing near the Great Northern Railway Station, from which a road climbs to Mill Hill’s “Angel and Crown.” Such a place has to take the consequences of its loftiness in keeping both its valley stations at a distance, a mile or so to the south. Down the northern slope of the ridge lead other pleasant field-ways, that would bring us to Totteridge on the next swell of land, which belongs to that inlet of Hertfordshire crossed by the Great North Road.

This finely situated village straggles roomily along the swarded and shaded ridge road, dropping at the west end into a valley in which lies its Midland station. Where our paths from Hendon come out upon the road, to the left we have the Church, making a very modest appearance in face of a Nonconformist neighbourthat turns a conspicuous face to the south. This is Mill Hill School, founded a century ago as a Congregational seminary, and now flourishing as an undenominational public school, which has had among its pupils Judge Talfourd, Lamb’s friend, and among its masters Dr. Murray, of the “Oxford Dictionary,” an enterprise begun here in the “Scriptorium,” that made a treasured shrine till lately destroyed by fire. Older relics are the cedars and other fine trees, some of them said to have been planted by the hands of Linnæus, when these grounds made Collinson’s Botanic Garden. The school has now a chapel that would open the eyes of primitive sectaries, and a museum representing the natural history of the neighbourhood.

While this school has thrown off all particularity of austere dissent, Mill Hill bears a banyan-grove of Catholic institutions, which stand prominent about the ridge, St. Vincent’s Orphanage to the east, at the other end a Franciscan nunnery with an adjacent industrial school, and behind it St. Joseph’s Missionary College, its tower crowned by a conspicuous gilt statue, stamped on the memory of itsalumniin all parts of the heathen world. The place seems thus to be mostly made up of public buildings, the more so now that barracks have been built at the east end of the ridge; but of late there appear signs of suburban invasion towards the Midland station.

The wanderer in no hurry should by all means keep on to the west end of Mill Hill, and thence mount to Highwood, a height running across to the next ridge,thus gained most pleasantly when the clay bottom between is well soaked. Highwood itself is a select hamlet, about the gates of three mansions and their grounds. The gardens of the Moat Manor make a sight open on Sundays, and here is another relic of old London, ex-neighbour of Temple Bar, the Hall of Serjeants’ Inn, re-erected by the late Serjeant Cox, on the dissolution of the society. Highwood House, where Coventry Patmore lived in his youth, was once the home of Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore and of the Zoological Gardens, who had Samuel Wilberforce for a neighbour. On coming up to a little patch of green before the “Rising Sun,” one can turn along by a road of grand old trees hiding these mansions, which presently reaches a stile looking over to the ridge on which Barnet stands, and here forks, the left branch going up to Barnet Gate, the right one running airily along the Totteridge ridge with its mile of village green. Or, a little way beyond the “Rising Sun,” one might have taken a lane turning left by the gate of Moat Manor, then presently a field-path to the right, which goes down and up to the road by Barnet Gate, giving off a left fork to reach this road nearer Elstree. So near London it is not easy to find a stretch of country that seems so well to keep its rural innocence wedded to squirely dignity, though, indeed, its squires are now like to have the luck of being Metropolitan brewers or newspaper proprietors.

To get back to Watling Street from Highwood, one takes the road downhill in the other direction, turningto the right where in doubt till Dean’s Brook is passed, beside which a path cuts across towards the station at Edgware. Turns to the left would have fetched Mill Hill Midland Station, whence a path leads to the winding lane that reaches the London end of Edgware through its dependency Hale. From Hendon the shortest line is through Colin Dale, by which, perhaps, came a branch of the ancient way leading over Hampstead Heath.

On the opposite side of the Edgware Road, marked ways go off towards Kingsbury and Harrow. There is not much to say about Red Hill and the last two miles of this road, on which the tram-line stops for the present at the top of the village street, still looking like a real village, with old inns that hint at its importance in coaching days. The original name is said to have beenEdgworth, transplanted into Ireland by the family of the novelist. On the right turns off the way to the station, beyond the Church, with its ancient tower. The turning to the left, for Stanmore, leads in a few minutes to Whitchurch, where Handel was, or was not, organist for a time; and in the churchyard is the tomb of William Powell, that Edgware Vulcan whose rhythmic hammerings were understood to have suggested the melody of the “Harmonious Blacksmith”; but this legend is doubtful. Dr. W. H. Cummings, in his book on Handel, claims to have proved it a fable. This church is notable for the Chandos tombs and the elaborate ornamentation supplied by the prodigal Duke of Chandos, who was Handel’s patronas well as Hogarth’s. His seat, Canons Park, still overshadows Whitchurch and the upper end of Edgware with its timber, but it seems about to share the fate of all “eligible building land” so near London.

James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, held the then profitable office of Paymaster-General under Queen Anne, and out of its perquisites built here what Defoe described as the most magnificent palace in the kingdom, surrounded by gardens and canals that could be equalled only at Wanstead Park, another English Versailles, now a playground of East-End Londoners. The Canons household numbered over a hundred persons, including a guard to make the rounds of the park at night, and musicians for giving that despoiler of the public purse the luxury of a full choral service in his chapel, to accompany a preacher who “never mentioned hell to ears polite.” At his dinner in public state each course was proclaimed by a flourish of trumpets. Nor was music the only art he patronized in an outlay which seems to have given Pope a cue for his satirical account of Timon’s Villa.

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