The record-union., 1893-08-12

ou enter the Heath al once from old
hampstead town, and instantly compre-
memo that the region and its attractions
70 Lohuoners must be considered in three
d1sunct and delicious aspects-its ad-
Nahtages Tor free and untrammeled re-
creation, lis positive Inspiration to paint
OF ana poet and excellent uses for the nat
urallst, and from those blendlngs and en-
Nlronment of mellow age, tenderest as
pect OF all, which furnish the idler and
dreamer host OF winsome memories.
Flrst OF all 1t is a wild and rugged heath
and not a park. Dark, windr fir
trees hang against sandy ridges where
tney nave Tor centuries clutched the vir-
GIN SOIL. There are high banks OF red
sand pierced by rabbit burrows. An
Gent bitches and hedges cut each other
at sharp angles. Narrow bournes or ra-
vines, their followed floors of clear and
shining sand plow the hills in faneiful
burrows, providing tiny crags of furze,
mounds of verdure and pleasant ways
and shade, as if one walked in well-worn
ancient water courses.
Altogether il is mass of hills scooped
into innumerable pits and cavities. thread
ed with tiny ponds, banked everywhere
with hardy gorse and mazes of heather.
wild flowers and grass. splatched with
knots OF noble trees, intersected by count
less footways, wild and ragged as when
the Romans were here, and all seemingly
held toge her by interlacing roadwavs
with rugged sides of rocks and sand and
pines and furze. Around it is shining
thread OF lovely hamlets, stately halls
ana wlnsome cottages, all gabled. ivied,
old. Within it on gardened hills and
blossoming hollows, or at its slumberous
edges, where old structures like old folk
seem to love to doze in sun and shade,
are scores of those quaint and ancient
Sffll tho ri, -
the "merrie England" of long age, and the
whole region is eXhilirating from its free,
fine uncouthness and the ceaseless breeZes
sweeping from Odorous northern Wales,
ever inviting to their life-giving dalliance
the city millions below, and beating back
from these fields of pleasure the pestilen-
tial breath of grimy London town, Is it
any wonder that the hundreds OF thou
sands of London folk who come here give
themselves to unrestrained enjoyment, or
that this transition from city woes and
walls produces such a joyous delirium to
young and old that you will hear on
Hampstead Heath more ringing, almost
ecstatlc laughter. than in any other place
in all the world?
Seated beneath the flagstaff which
marks the highest elevation of the Heath
one can readily understand how the re-
gion roundabout has been the best be-
loved OF all the near hauntS of London
naturalists, and why. from the days of
Gainesborough ana Constable it has fur
nlshed the landscape artists canvas with
many OF its noblest themes and scenes.
1t is the one place in England where its
greatest city and vast expanse of typi-
cal English landscape can be contem-
plated almost at the same glance. Wide
open to the wind and sun stretches vale
alter vale to the southeast, the north and
the west. Your circling view extends
IGh oh r1,o
north can be traced the spire of Hainslop
Steeple, i'll Northamptonshire. The
knocholt Beeches in Kent, the hills and
downs OF Surrey, the Laindon hills Of
Essex, the turrets of royal Windsor in
Berks, and a church on the far borders of
OXtOrdshlre, are in full view.
Down below old Hampstead, enfogged
by the eXhalations of hundreds and
thousa of chimneys, in the distance
It's myriad roofs like plain of broken
and seething lava, lies the metropolis of
the world, the dome of gray old ST. Paul's
like peak of useless steel in meas
ureless, incinerating mass. What mind
can grasp the magnitude of human his
tory, OF human accomplishment and of
human despair within this single circle of
vision.
One is said to always find good COM
pany at Hampstead Heath. Y es, even if
alone. You can still sit here by the flag
stall with no one to converse with and
conJure up grewsome or goodly COM
pany. 1t was at Hampstead Heath as at
Hounslow Heath that the Jacksons, the
Duvalls and the Turpins of the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cut
purses and throats, if needs be. to get
them, and made merry as lords at its
inns, some of which are here to minister
alike to saint and sinner now. Over
against the gardens of Wildwood, at the
side of Heath Hill road, still stands the
ancient Gibbet Elm. Upon its huge old
arms, many centuries old, were hung in
chains, when caught, these merry knights
of the road.
The same locality, as you stroll to-
wards Spaniard's road, will remind you
as you look at the little oriel window of
Wildwood House, of the saddest year of
Lord Chatham's lite-the year when the
English nations destinies were tremb-
ling in the balance and Chatham shut up
here like a monk at penance STRUGGLED
and prayed to be physically new and
whole. 1t was here that Addison and his
friends passed their summer evenings IN
the gardens of the old BELL and Bush''
Tavern. George Stevens, Shakespeare's
noted commentator, lived and died at the
ancient Upper Flask' Inn. Dr. j ohnson
wrote his Vanity of Human Wishes''
down there at Frognall, in the edge of
of the subject by his giddy
wife, VINO, housed ut the Wells, the an
clent Hampstead Heath spa, constantly
quarrelled with her physician about hay-
ing her blonde tresses dyed black
In the Grove at Highgate still stands
the house in which Samuel TAYLOR Cole
ridge lived and died. Richardson last
ingly connected his memory with the
Heath by lodging mis- heroine, "Clarissa
HarIOwe," at the Upper Flask Inn. Lord
ManSneld, who once resided at Caen
Wood, used to give dinners to the poor,
to from four to five hundred at a time,
presenting each guest with half crown
and quartern loaf when dinner was
over" Lord Erskine once lived near the
Spanlard's Inn, and this most famous
historic inn of the Heath, which is Still
standing, owes much of its noteworthi-
ness 10 its old-time proprietor inviting
the mo Popery," or Gordon rioters,
who, after burning Lord Manstield's
house in Bloomsbury, came to destroy
his rural seat at Caen Wood, into his own
cellars, where they became so drunk that
the rescuing troops drove them like sheep
down the Hampstead hills into trenzied
London. Dickens utilized the incident
in "Barnaby Rudge," and he also brought
the immortal Pickwick to Hampstead
Ponds to pursue his earnest scientific in
vestigations.
Indeed goodly volume could be writ
ten upon these worthless whose love of
breezy Hampstead Heath has left upon it
one of its rarest and sweetest charms.
Hazlitt and Hayden often met