THE Switzerland of Middlesex is a name that has been fondly given to those heights closing the vista up northward openings from Oxford Street. Hampstead ranks as a London borough, and so should stand out of the scope of our survey. But we cannot pass by the cream of the county’s scenery, even though it has been half spoiled to make the choicest of suburbs, a crowd of homes for the classes, and a holiday resort for the masses, with suburblets and dependencies of its own in once outlying hamlets like South Hill, North End, Child’s Hill, Belsize, and so on, not to speak of adjoining districts that cling to its skirts by such usurped titles as South Hampstead and West Hampstead.

Middlesex has other hills as high and bold as Hampstead, which owes its eminent amenity to a topping of Bagshot sand, here rarer than in Surrey, giving a dry and broken surface, natural nursery for heath and copsewood. Heedless digging out of sand and gravel has but increased the picturesque irregularity; and even the enclosures filched from the common in former days add a charm of contrast, where the richer greenery of private groves or avenues masses itself above the scarred mounds and hollows, so wildly overgrown, so deviously threaded by embowered tracks among thorny tangles, bosky knolls, thickets of bracken and broom. It takes a poet to describe the manifold aspects of this half-tamed wilderness:

The “village” itself, grown to a borough of more than eighty thousand people, may well be said to “revel in varieties,” all the more now that its smart, newer streets make a frame for the intricate ascents on which stately mansions, snug villas, and tumbledown cottages stand huddled together; and trim suburban roads are still here and there lined with the remains of park-like avenues. Hampstead is much changed in our time, but, more conscientiously than most suburbs, it clings to fragments of the past, unwilling to destroy scenes and buildings whose embalmed memories go to keep up its rents.

This favourite purlieu of London has larger books than mine devoted to its history. Through the mists of the past is dimly seen a homestead clearing in the great Middlesex forest, that became a manor of Westminster Abbey and a hunting-ground of our kings; then, by-and-by, a resort of Londoners when they could stroll out safely across the open fields of St. Pancras and Marylebone. At the time of the Plague it made a camp of refuge, as it had done from a great flood of the Thames in the previous century, and would do again when, on its wooded heights, homeless families looked back to the glare of the Great Fire, which they took for a prelude of the Judgment Day. The Middlesex elections were at one time held on the Heath, serving also for a racecourse and fair-ground. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Epsom and Tunbridge Spas set the fashion, the chalybeate well at Hampstead became a resort, like other wells about London that had long enjoyed a name as miraculous remedies. The Hampstead Spa, still commemorated in Well Walk, soon came to be a scene of idle diversion and heady revels, more like to kill than cure, about which the village of lodgings grew fast, as Defoe notes, “even on the very steep of the Hill, where there’s no walking Twenty yards together without Tugging up a Hill or straddling down a Hill.” Several other pleasure-grounds sprang up in the vicinity, such as the once-famed Belsize Gardens, the most noble that Pepys ever saw, before the mansion was turned into a “folly-house,” precursor of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. This suburban Vanity Fair advertised among its attractions “twelve stout fellows completely armed to patrol between Belsize and London”—a guard which had to be increased as robbers swarmed like flies round the concourse of gamblers. The sign of the “Flask” preserves the name of another resort in vogue for a time. Our Bank Holiday Saturnalia seem a flicker of those more expensive high-jinks that went out in a snuff of scandal. The Long Room of the Wells is said to have been turned into a chapel, of better repute than their Sion Chapel, which, like the Fleet, was once notorious for illicit marriages. After ranking for a time as “one of the politest public places in England,” in the latter part of the century Hampstead seems to have had a quieter reputation, when the philanthropist Thomas Day brought his wife here to be out of the world; and it figures as a secluded spot in the Fool of Quality, that Sandford-and-Mertonish romance so much admired by Charles Wesley and Charles Kingsley. Here also are laid some of the scenes of Clarissa Harlowe, and of Evelina.

By this time Hampstead was attracting famous residents as a retreat from the smoke and din of London. It had borne a humble name for laundresses from a time when they might have ducked Falstaff in its ponds. In the age of wigs and waistcoats we have glimpses of Steele, Addison, Goldsmith, Johnson, the Kit Cat Club, and, indeed, almost all the literary notabilities, as occasional lodgers or visitors; then about a century ago Hampstead drew together a galaxy of artists and poets, who found inspiration in its lovely surroundings. A later inhabitant, Coventry Patmore, tells us how Millfield Lane, leading round Caen Wood

to Highgate, used to be known as Poets’ Lane, so often was it trod by sons of the Muses, whose publishers sometimes drove or rode to town from more spacious dwellings than sheltered Keats and Leigh Hunt. Caen or Ken Wood, which at one time belonged to the unpopular Lord Bute, reminds us of a constellation of lawyers, when the great Lord Mansfield settled here, and had for neighbour on the heath the eloquent Erskine; while Rosslyn House, lower down, was the seat of Wedderburn, another judge whose name is held in less honour—all three poor Scottish cadets who grew fat on the English bench. In our generation, its rents and rates are like to keep poets out of this paradise; but it is still well stocked with successful Scotsmen, and is said to make a promised land for the chosen people of the Old Dispensation, as Defoe says it did in his own day.

Among the many authors once at home here was William Howitt, to whose Northern Heights of London, or to books like Park’s History, Baines’s Records, and Mrs. White’s Sweet Hampstead, I must refer my reader for a long list of celebrities. It is half a century ago since Howitt looked from his beloved heights, too truly prophesying how soon the open view would be engulfed in “this monster development of burnt clay, and buried for ever beneath its dingy piles! Look along the feet of these yet green and smiling hills—east and west, far and wide comes up, as it were, a giant army to desolate and trample them down. See that front rank of the great house-army, far as the eye can reach before you, and on either hand, coming on with a step ‘steady as time and inexorable as death.’” The same writer records attempts of successive Sovereigns to limit the growth of the capital, but no Canute could stay the advance of its swelling population, sucked together from all ends of the earth. Yet, since his day, something has been done here to stem the tide that threatened to drown so much beauty. The Heath itself stands up like an Ararat above the deluge of brick and mortar, rescued from further encroachment and spoliation, protected by Act of Parliament, even extended of late by reclamations or acquisitions of private property thrown into the public demesne.

Our way to the top is now to be made easy by a tube railway. Hitherto the ascent has been a true pilgrimage, the nature of the ground, as well as the gentility of the place, not much encouraging public conveyances. The titular Hampstead road, as we know, mounts from Camden Town, past Chalk Farm, once a quiet spot notorious for duels, now a noisy railway depot; up Haverstock Hill, where a street name recalls the abode of Sir Richard Steele; then by Rosslyn Hill to the steep and irregular winding of the High Street. Hampstead Heath Station lies off to the right, at South End, the foot of the Lower Heath. Further to the other side, through the Belsize district, is the Swiss Cottage Station of the Metropolitan line. When this was a newly-made terminus, I lived on the top of Hampstead Hill, and my way home was by a field-path, with a bad name for garrotters, that is now Fitzjohn’s Avenue, the smartest and most expensive street in North London, though architectural purists may gnash their teeth over its eclectic amenities. Its young trees, now beginning to give some shade to the seats along this broad avenue, lead up to the Church quarter, where old buildings have mainly gone down before new ones, but still Church Row shows a blotched face of mellow comeliness from the days when Mrs. Barbauld kept a school here; and the Soldiers’ Orphan Asylum to the right represents at least the site of what was Bishop Butler’s home, and before him Sir Harry Vane’s. Exploration on this side would reveal a bit of old Hampstead that may take rank as a picturesque slum. On the other side, the slope below the church is seamed by the devious roads of the Frognal quarter, in which lived that lover of London and its suburbs, Sir Walter Besant. It is well known how death cut short his preparation of a Metropolitan survey on a huge scale. The materials he left behind him have been partly used for a series of small volumes under the general title of The Fascination of London; and in one of these, half devoted to Hampstead,[A] we are told how the Frognal Priory that once flourished here was a mere mock-antique folly of a middle-class Horace Walpole.

Hampstead Church is more admirable for its situation than for its structure, which dates from the eighteenth century, and shows the peculiar feature of the chancel being at the west end. The pretty churchyard has fine peeps of prospect and several notable graves. Here is buried Sir James Mackintosh, the reformer so warmly praised by Macaulay. Close to each other lie two old neighbours at Hampstead, Lucy Aikin and Joanna Baillie, who share the fate of a literary fame brighter for their own generation than for ours. In the church it was left to American admirers to place a bust of John Keats, whose name has shone far and wide since his obscure sojourn where he loved

Incledon, the singer, is buried inside. Of quaint epitaphs there appears only one, to Mr. John Hindley. Most of the monuments are of an elegant type, answering to Hampstead’s later character. The tomb to be first sought out, under the south-eastern wall of the church, is Constable’s, painter of so many scenes from his “sweet Hampstead,” which has had as strong attraction for artists as for poets. Collins, Romney, Linnell, Blake, Clarkson Stanfield, were some of those familiar here. In the extension of the burial-ground across the road, by the railing at the lower end, lie the cremated ashes of Gerald du Maurier, the popular Punch artist, who lived at New Grove House a little way above. Sir Gilbert Scott was not the only distinguished architect who has made his home near Hampstead Church.

But we shall never get to the top if we linger beside all such memorials of renown, which may be sought out by the help of Miss Mitton’s book above mentioned. Heath Street, mounting from Church Row, comes into the backbone line of High Street. Hence the explorer may lose himself in the labyrinth of steep roads and lanes winding upwards, to come out where the Heath opens at about its highest point, recorded by a tablet, on a house off the right of the main road, as being level with the top of St. Paul’s. If one stray too far to the right, the spire of Christ Church makes a beacon towards the Lower Heath, by the edge of which is the way up from Hampstead Heath Station, passing, below this church, the tall elms of the Well Walk, that was the centre of Spa gaieties. If one bear rather to the left, that course should lead out on the Judges’ Walk, a grandly-shaded terrace looking over the West Heath and the country beyond. This gets its name from a tradition that, in the Plague year, the law-courts were held at Hampstead al fresco, suitors from infected and non-infected quarters keeping to opposite sides of the ridge running on from the pond at the head of our main line of ascent.

The open plateau here, marked by a round pond and a flag-staff, may be taken as a central spot from which to orient ourselves. The view, weather permitting, is a noble one, the most prominent feature to the right being the dome of St. Paul’s, and to the left the spire of Harrow-on-the-Hill, rising over the Welsh Harp Water, with, perhaps, a glimpse of Windsor Castle. Bounded more closely to the north by the Barnet ridge, it is said by writers of a less smoky age to take in the Laindon Hills of Essex eastwards, and in the other direction the spire of Hanslop, a few miles from Northampton.

The ridge road onwards separates the Upper and the Lower Heath, the former on the left the more wildly broken expanse, the latter sloping more barely, with squashy patches, to the line of ponds, along which it makes an open playground. Close at hand, in the hollow to the east, peep up the chimneys of the Vale of Health, a curious gathering of tightly-packed houses fringed by tea-gardens and dominated by a big public-house, the whole looking as if it did not quite know what it meant to make of itself. This colony must have lost the sanitary reputation it had when Leigh Hunt lived here, visited by Keats, Shelley, and other disciples of the “Cockney Poet” school. Beside it is the highest of the chain of ponds separating Hampstead Heath from Highgate Fields, going to fill that “river of wells” which once ran above ground as the Fleet, so much of a river that an eighteenth-century picture in the Guildhall shows barges riding upon it at Holborn; and so late as Victorian days its upper bed could be traced beside the Fleet Road that records it below Hampstead Heath Station. From this bank of clay, with its sand cope breaking into springs, rise other streams that flow under London, and come to light in the park waters of the West End, their hidden course marked by such names as Kilburn, Westbourne, Tyburn, St. Mary-le-Bourne, Brook Street, as by the crooked shape of Marylebone Lane. The ponds, when first formed or improved, were actually used as a water-supply, but are now kept as a reserve in case of fire, one of them, like one at Highgate, serving for a bathing-place.

Advancing on the ridge road, we pass “Jack Straw’s Castle,” a famous old tavern that holds its head high after catering for patrons like Dickens and Macready. I bear in mind nearly forty years with what dignified pity the head waiter handed back his tip of twopence to a country parson not duly aware of this being no common public-house. Here, to the left, goes off at an acute angle the Hendon Road, dividing the Upper Heath into its west and north sections. Above the latter the ridge road runs straight on to that other old hostelry, the “Spaniards,” in the garden of which Mrs. Bardell was arrested while carousing with her friends on the elusive profits of her action against Mr. Pickwick. A landmark at this further end is the conspicuous group of Italian pines that have figured on many a canvas, so as to be perhaps the best-known feature of Hampstead scenery. On the right of the ridge road here the Lower Heath has a park-like aspect, borne out by a large red mansion intruding itself towards the edge of Caen Wood. But the most richly ragged part of the common, sweetest in blossom-time and glorious in autumn, lies to the other side.

To see the Upper Heath at its best one should descend upon it from outside the buildings about “Jack Straw’s Castle,” making towards the Leg of Mutton Pond at the western edge. Keeping round this edge to the north, one presently comes to the grounds of Golder’s Hill, seat of Sir Spencer Wells, and after his death saved from the builder to make a public paradise, where, indeed, as often happens in such cases, the mansion has proved to be rather a white elephant. Beyond this, among a cluster of refreshment-houses, across the Hendon Road, their doyen is the “Bull and Bush,” with its old-fashioned garden, traditional resort of Addison, Garrick, Hogarth, Sterne, and other celebrities. Next is reached the double hamlet of North End and Wildwood, a charmingly secluded group of cottages and mansions, one of them North End House, famed as the gloomy retreat of the great Lord Chatham. We might hence gain the Hendon Road up a grand avenue of chestnuts faced by lime-trees, which is not always discovered by wanderers on the Heath. But the leisurely explorer is advised to hold on to the common beyond the houses, and there turn left to a knoll commanding an expanse of green, bordered by the Hendon heights beyond the Finchley Road. At this edge of the Heath a scheme is on foot for planting a “Garden Suburb,” as homoeopathic remedy against any eruption of vulgar building.

Still keeping to the edge of the Heath, one comes up to its northern end by that fragmentary avenue of storm-beaten pines near which Erskine House stands beside the “Spaniards,” according to one story so named as having been once the residence of a Spanish

ambassador, while another explanation of the sign makes its origin like that of a more widely famed Keller, whose landlord was an Auerbach man. At the time of the Gordon Riots this inn was kept by a man who seems to have passed for a Spaniard among his neighbours, of one of whom he well earned grateful favour. When Lord Mansfield’s town-house had been burned by the mob, a body of rioters swarmed out to attack Caen Wood, but were cunningly delayed by this landlord with free supplies of drink till soldiers could be brought up to protect the judge’s mansion.

Beside the road onwards now swells, to the right, a noble mass of timber in the park of the Earls of Mansfield, who still possess Caen Wood, while they have another most enviable home at Scone Palace on the Tay. If ever this family were driven to mend their fortune, like others of our aristocracy, by marrying a Chicago millionaire’s daughter, they might choose rather to sell such a valuable property, which as yet has been kept safe from the suburban builder. But the episcopal estate on the other side of the road has ceased to give sanctuary to Nature, as we may see by Bishopswood Avenue, running off towards East Finchley, and further threats of streets in this direction, though opposite the gate of Caen Wood, below the “Spaniards,” a field-way still leads to the “Five Bells” of Finchley.

Under the modest title of Hampstead Lane, the main road now mounts and winds up to Highgate Church, which may be gained in other ways from Hampstead. Round Caen Wood passes that Poet’s Lane, now too prosaically fenced in, and leads to the Highgate Ponds, beneath a height studded with mansions and grounds. The east side of Hampstead Heath, beyond its line of ponds, merges into the Highgate Fields, bought for the public at a king’s ransom, less wild than the adjacent playground, but fitter for the games that spangle this expanse of open slopes. Towards the north side will be seen a tree-planted tumulus, about which hangs some misty popular legend of the flight from Boadicea’s defeat at Battle Bridge by the Fleet River, close to King’s Cross Station. It has been opened and explored, though not thoroughly, without any remains being discovered. On the southern edge swells up Parliament Hill, formerly known as Traitors’ Hill, since here the gunpowder plotters proposed to watch their explosion, where smoke too often hides a fine view over London, beyond the further expanse of playing-fields named from the Gospel Oak, an old preaching station. By this height there is a way across from Hampstead Heath Station, above which cluster the houses of South Hill, one of several outlying suckers of this favourite suburb.

Highgate makes a worthy neighbour to Hampstead, not standing quite as high in the world, but with a dignity and distinction of its own, and no small wealth of treasured memories. Its steep ascents have not been so much invaded by mere smartness; the face towards Hampstead, at least, shows quality rather than quantity in its colonization. So, on the height rising from a welter of lower suburbs, it better preserves the roomy amenities of the time when “Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate ... a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma, his Dodona oak-grove whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon”; and among other pilgrims to the lofty shrine came one not over-devout Scot, who could note how “wide sweeps of flowery, leafy gardens, their few homes mostly hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy umbrage, flowed gloriously downhill, gloriously issuing in wide-tufted, undulating country, rich in all charms of field and town.”

The approaches from Lower Hampstead fall into the line of West Hill, to the foot of which road run tramways and buses through Kentish Town, that has undergone a certain social subsidence since from his windows here Leigh Hunt could look out on Caen Wood. But as we hence begin the ascent to Highgate, on the right is passed a model village, in quite baronial style, guarding the approach to Holly Lodge, seat of the late beneficent millionaire Lady Burdett-Coutts, whose mother was Coutts the banker’s daughter, and her father Sir Francis Burdett, that firebrand of radical reform, cooling down in later years so as to be taunted with his “recant of patriotism”—epigram which seems a reading backwards of Horace Walpole’s gibe against Whitfield, who “had not recanted, only canted.” This lady’s great wealth fell to her by inheritance through the will of her maternal grandfather’s second wife, a marked figure in the society of a century ago, who had been Miss Mellon the actress, and came to be Duchess of St. Albans in the end. The lucky heiress, who perhaps suggested Miss Dunstable in Trollope’s novels, found her hand sought by many suitors, among them Prince Louis Napoleon; but, like Miss Dunstable, she was long in making her choice. Her friend Queen Victoria honoured her with a peerage in her own right; and, with national benedictions, a place was made for her in Westminster Abbey.

Higher up, this road is bordered by many fine mansions, among which the “Fox and Crown,” while it stood, had special license to display the Royal Arms, in token of the gallantry of its landlord, who at the risk of his life stopped the young Queen Victoria’s carriage when the horses had almost run away down a hill that at any pace should be descended with caution. On the right stands the Church, a modern one, notable for its far-seen spire, and for the monument inside to S. T. Coleridge, who spent his last days peacefully at No. 3, The Grove, that quiet row of houses to the left behind the shady green, blocked up by a reservoir. He is buried in the vaults beneath Highgate School above, which was the site of the old church.

Below the present church the grounds of the old Mansion House on the slope have become a cemetery, bisected by the lane coming up past Holly Lodge. The situation of this makes it the finest of London’s burial-grounds, having from the terrace at the top an open view over the northern suburbs, too much blocked up by private enclosures on other sides of the hill. Many celebrated persons lie here, from Faraday to Tom Sayers, among them George Eliot, whose grave in the lower part is inscribed with her own lines:

The cemetery adjoins the beautiful park presented to his neighbours by the late Sir Sydney Waterlow, beyond which we get on to the steeper ascent of Highgate Hill, a line more thickly strung with historic interest. This road comes up from the great artery of London that was once a veritable Hollow-way. At the foot of the hill the Whittington College Almshouses commemorate the name of that fortunate-unfortunate youth who here heard Bow Bells calling him back to be Lord Mayor of London. The very stone on which he may have sat down is seen incorporated in a lamp-post a little way up the hill. In our day, with his last copper, he might have rested his stiff legs in a cable tramcar, soon carrying him above a roar of traffic that would drown Bow Bells, even if they had not to be rung gingerly for fear of bringing down their tower. Higher up, where Hornsey Lane goes off to Crouch End, he would pass a Roman Catholic church and monastery, whose dome makes a landmark from more than one point of view. Above this comes Waterlow Park, the mansion in which, Lauderdale House, is believed to have been once occupied by Nell Gwynne; and a brass in the wall outside marks the abode of Andrew Marvell. On the other side of the road, Cromwell House, with its neighbour, Ireton House, now a convalescent home, is said to have been built by the Protector for his son-in-law Ireton. A little higher on that side stood Arundel House, where Lord Bacon died of a chill caught in the unlucky experiment of getting out of his coach on Highgate Hill to stuff a fowl with snow.

At the top, beside Pond Square, which is Highgate’s quiet Charing Cross, this road converges with those coming up by West Hill and from Hampstead Heath. Here the “Gatehouse Inn” preserves the memory of that high gate at which the Bishops of London, as lords of the manor, levied toll upon vehicles passing over the hill, a privilege that appears to have been originally granted by Edward III. to a hermit who undertook to keep the roads in repair. His turnpike hermitage is supposed to have been on the site of the old church, now occupied by Sir Roger Cholmeley’s school. Till a century ago the Great North Road bravely mounted to this gate, when from the windows of the Gatehouse could be seen a dozen other hostelries, their common sign those famous horns that proclaimed them a resort of junketing Cockneys, who, as well as passing travellers, received the freedom of Highgate by “swearing on the horns.” This was a burlesque pleasantry of more or less coarse features, which long survived through the rites of libation kept up to the profit of that conservative trade, the licensed victuallers. An essential part of the ceremony was a fee drunk for the good of the house. The origin of it is obscure, but it may have arisen as a verbal play on drinking from a horn, as seems to have been the custom in “Drunken Barnaby’s” time. The classic form of the oath is preserved in Hone’s Year Book, with an illustration by George Cruickshank. The initiated one was called on to swear that he would not eat brown bread if he could get white, nor drink small beer if he could get strong, nor kiss the maid if he could kiss the mistress, always with certain reserved cases, the conclusion being, “Kiss the horns, or a pretty girl if you see one here, and so be free of Highgate.” Recent research has not shown the horns exhibited over any Highgate inn, yet no lack of girls deserving to be kissed, in strict accordance with police regulations.

From the school the line of that old North Road drops to converge with the modern one coming round the east side of the hill. The latter may be gained at once down Southwood Lane, which has pretty peeps between its houses, and at the lower end some fine old trees, relics of a noble seat. This brings us into the present highroad at Highgate Station, where turns off the way to Muswell Hill beside Highgate Woods, a trim pleasure-ground of lawns and low thickets traversed by arched alleys and glades, in which one might well forget being not yet clear of London suburbs. On the opposite side of the Muswell Hill Road, Queenswood makes another shady park, its groves well displayed in the hollow formerly known as Churchyard Bottom. Through it one comes out in view of Hornsey, where a fresh forest of houses appears beyond a gap of green playing-fields.

This young Middlesex borough of over 70,000 people must not be passed over without notice, though it does not hold up its head like its “classy” neighbours. Yet Hornsey is as old a place as any of them, once boasting lordly seats and parks, now turned into streets and playgrounds; and while its character is rather for respectable snugness and smugness, it has still some picturesque nooks. Indeed, proud Highgate itself, into which runs also the London parish of St. Pancras, is in large part a municipal dependency, as it was once a chapelry of the parish whose name seems better represented by the old form Harringay, “field of hares,” as it may well have been, like its namesake at the opposite end of the county. Hornsey’s new Church overshadows an ivied tower of the old one, beside which the most distinguished tomb is that of Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, whose first pleasures of memory belonged to Stoke Newington Green. Tom Moore lived for a time at Muswell Hill, in a cottage named “Lalla Rookh,” said to have been formerly a rural retreat of Abraham Newland, the most popular prose author of his day as signing the Bank of England notes. I mentioned him in Surrey as the traditional godfather of Newland’s Corner, but I see the Dictionary of National Biography allows him no villeggiatura further than Highbury, and states that he never slept out of the bank till his retirement. Let the local antiquaries look into this matter, one of whom, Mr. R. O. Sherington, has published an interesting little book about the parish. All traces of antiquity

are like to be swept away by a growth so rapid that Mother Shipton’s portent, Highgate Hill standing in the middle of London, would appear now no such impossibility, if the city did not spread as fast in other directions.

But the lion of Hornsey is the Alexandra Palace, that stands more conspicuous than beautiful on Muswell Hill, most of it, indeed, in the adjoining parish of Wood Green. This northern rival of the Crystal Palace, opened a generation ago, at the same distance of six miles from Charing Cross, had a career of intermittent unprosperity as a speculation, but now that it is public property its fortunes seem to be on the mend. The building contains much the same quasi-educational attractions as the Crystal Palace, combined with all the fun of a fair. Inside is boasted the “greatest cycle track in the world,” and the lower part of the park on the Tottenham side was laid out as a race-course. On the higher side, about the Muswell Hill entrance, is a grove preserving some fine trees. In the Coronation year this made the scene of a lively encampment of colonial troops, who did not keep the Pax Britannica, since our white fellow-subjects proved too ready to resent the manner in which black or brown auxiliaries were treated as men and brethren by the local nursery-maids.

From Muswell Hill one has a wide view of green ridges vanishing under brick. To the east, indeed, appears a new prospect, the flat valley of the Lea, bounded by Epping Forest. From other open points on these northern heights of London, one sees Middlesex in its more characteristic aspect of waves of land swelling out of green troughs and breaking into a foam of structures of all shapes and sizes, from tombstones to palaces. This scenery we can best explore by following the lines of the main roads that run north and west out of London. On that more crowded area let us now turn our backs, having reached its official edge at the further end of Hampstead Heath, and again on Highgate Hill.