1716, it is announced that "Sion Chapel, at Hampstead, being a private and pleasure place, many persons of the best fashion have lately been married there. Now, as a minister is obliged constantly to attend, this is to give notice that all persons upon bringing a licence, and who shall have their wedding dinner in the gardens, may be married in that said chapel without giving any fee or reward whatsoever; and such as do not keep their wedding dinner at the gardens, only five shillings will be demanded of them for all fees."

The exact site of this chapel is no longer known, but in all probability it adjoined the Wells, and belonged to the keeper of the adjoining tavern. There can be little or no doubt that it was a capital speculation before the trade in such matters was spoiled, a century or so ago, by the introduction of the "Private Marriage Act," so cruelly introduced by Lord Hardwicke.

This being the condition of the place, we need not be surprised to learn that its popularity with certain classes was unbounded. In fact, so much was Hampstead the rage at the beginning of the last century, that in the comedy of Hampstead Heath above referred to we find one of the characters, "Arabella," the wife of a citizen, thus telling us what she thinks of the place:

"Well, this Hampstead 's a charming place, to dance all night at the Wells, and be treated at Mother Huff's; to have presents made one at the raffling shops, and then take a walk in Caen Wood with a man of wit. But to be five or six miles from one's husband !-marriage were a happy state could one be always five or six miles from one's husband."

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August, 1709, he says:-"I am diverted from my train of discourse by letters from Hampstead, which give me an account there is a late institution there under the name of a Raffling Shop, which is (it seems) secretly supported by a person who is a deep practitioner in the law, and out of tenderness of conscience has, under the name of his maid Sisly, set up this easier way of conveyancing and alienating estates from one family to another."

The Wells continued to be more or less a place of resort for invalids, real and imaginary, down to the early part of the present century, when their fame was revived for a time by Mr. Thomas Goodwin, a medical practitioner of the place, who had made the discovery that the Hampstead waters were possessed of two kinds of saline qualities, answering to the springs of Cheltenham and Harrogate; but the tide of popular favour seems to have flowed in another direction, after the visit of George III. and his Court to Cheltenham, and Hampstead soon became deserted by its fashionable loungers, notwithstanding the efforts of the doctors, who missed their guineas, and those of the proprietors of the ball-rooms and the rafflingshops, to resuscitate its fame. Dr. Soame complained that the royal family visited the wells at Islington, then achieving a temporary popularity, and neglected Hampstead; and he also seized the opportunity of levelling his shafts at the habit of tea-drinking, then a comparatively modern innovation. "I hope," he says, "that the inordinate drinking of tea will be retrenched, which, if continued, must bring a thousand ills upon us, and generations after us-the next generation may be in stature more like pigmies than men and women." What would Dr. Soame have said could he have lived to see the members of the Middlesex Rifle Volunteers, every one of whom probably drinks tea every day, performing feats of prowess and agility while skirmishing among the furze-bushes and gravel-pits of his beloved Hampstead?

The "raffling shops," also alluded to, are mentioned in the Tatler, in which Mr. Isaac Bickerstaffe, otherwise Sir Richard Steele, the "Christian hero," thought fit, as censor of public morals, to call attention to them. Writing in

* See ante, p. 310.

But no amount of appeal or puff direct could make Hampstead what it was in its aristocratic days. The wells and ball-rooms remained, and were well attended, but by another class. Their

them to the London aborigines dwelling east of Temple Bar. The waters of Hampstead are no longer taken medicinally, and their former celebrity is now only remembered in the name of the charm ing little grove called Well Walk, which leads from Flask Walk towards the eastern side of the Heath, and where there has been set up, as though in mockery of the past, a modern drinking-fountain.

Well Walk was in former times the fashionable

morning lounge for the visitor to the "Wells; and here the gallants of the period could enjoy the fresh air in the shade of the tall lime-trees, which still remain along the edge of the raised pathway. In Well Walk, between the "Long Room" and the "Wells Tavern," lived and died John Constable, the painter. Like Gainsborough and Crome, Constable always proved himself a heartfelt lover of his English homestead. "I love," he said, "every stile, and stump, and lane in the village; as long as I am able to hold a brush I shall never cease to paint them." "The Cornfield or Country Lane" and "The Valley Farm," both in the National Gallery, may have suggested to Leslie the following passage :"There is a place," says this most sympathetic of critics on simply English art, among our painters which Turner left unoccupied, and which neither Wilson, Gainsborough, Cozens, nor Girtin so completely filled as Constable. He was the most genuine painter of English cultivated. scenery, leaving untouched its mountains and its lakes." His tomb in the old churchyard records that he was "many years an inhabitant of this parish." He died in 1837. Mrs. Barbauld, too, at one time, lived in Well Walk, where she was visited, not only by literary folks, but by men of high scientific attainments, such as Josiah Wedgwood. She afterwards lived at the foot of Rosslyn Hill, where we shall presently have more to say concerning her.

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It was in Well Walk that John Keats wrote both his "Endymion" and his "Eve of St. Agnes; and it was probably after hearing the nightingale in the adjoining gardens that he wrote those wellknown stanzas, in which he apostrophises "The light-winged Dryad of the trees."

"And wilt thou ponder on the silent grave

Of broken-hearted Keats, whom still we love
To image sleeping where the willows wave

By Memory's fount, deep in the Muses' grove?
Shaded, enshrouded, where no steps intrude,

But peace is granted him; his dearest boon;
And while he sleeps, with night-time tears bedew'd,

'Endymion' still is watched by his enamoured moon." The copyhold property in the rear of Well Walk belongs to the trustees of the Wells Charity, who are bound to devote its proceeds to apprenticing children, natives of Hampstead, under a scheme approved by the Court of Chancery.

Although it has not been attempted in these columns to enter into details respecting the geological structure of the localities which we have described, yet we ought not to omit to mention, with respect to Highgate and Hampstead, a few facts of interest to those who have the least taste for that branch of science.

It is well known to most readers that the whole of London lies on a substratum of chalk formation, which is covered by a higher stratum of a stiff bluish clay. On this again, there is every reason to believe, there once lay a covering of gravel and sand, which in the course of long ages has been washed away by the action of water, at a time when, probably, the whole valley of the Thames was an arm of the sea.

The "Northern Heights" of Highgate and Hampstead, if their formation is considered in detail, throw considerable light on this statement. Their summits exhibit a top coating or "cap" of gravel and sand, which, by some chance or other, has not been so swept away, but has maintained its position unchanged. This gravel and sand rest on an undersoil of a soft and spongy nature, from which issue springs of water, which appear to be squeezed out of the sides of the hills by the weight of the superincumbent mass.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge would sometimes come over across the green fields, by way of Millfield Lane, from Highgate, to meet Leigh Hunt; and it was when he was introduced to Keats here in Well Walk that, turning to Leigh Hunt, he whispered, "There is death in that hand." And such was too truly the case; for John Keats was in a consumption; and, as we have seen, he went abroad very soon afterwards, to die beneath the sunny skies of Italy.

These spongy soils gradually die away into a blue clay from thirty to five hundred feet in depth, in which, both at Hampstead and at Highgate, a variety of fossils have been found, proving the

but still differing from, those of our own age and latitude; some of these are of a marine and estuarine aquatic nature, showing that a sea must at one time have washed the sides of the heights that we have been climbing. As an instance in point, it may be mentioned that, in 1876, in boring a well through the clay at the brewery in High Street, the workmen came upon a fine specimen of the nautilus. Other marine shells of a smaller kind have been constantly dug up in the same stratum about these parts.

RETRACING our steps to the High Street, and passing up a narrow lane on the west side, called Church Lane, we find ourselves in Church Row. Here, and almost only here, the hand of the "improver" and "restorer" has not been at work; the projecting hooded doorways of the days of Queen Anne still frown over the entrances of the red-bricked houses on our right and left, just as they did in the days "when George III. was king;" and the whole street has an air of quiet, homely, and venerable respectability which we can scarcely see elsewhere. Long may it remain in statu quo, this venerable relic of the days when the fashionable crowd-the "quality"-gentlemen with powdered wigs and gold-headed canes, and ladies in farthingales and "hoops of wondrous size "-used to make "the Row" their evening parade, after drinking the waters at the chalybeate spring, which, as we have just seen, still flows so invitingly on the other side of the High Street. Like Flask Walk and Well Walk, and some other thoroughfares which we have mentioned, Church Row-and, indeed, the High Street also-could in former times boast of its row of lime-trees growing down the centre of the roadway. Those in the High Street, save one, disappeared long ago; and of those in Church Row one solitary lime remains as a memento of the past. It may not be out of place to add here that the sedan-chairs continued in use in Hampstead longer than in any other part of London; indeed, it was no farther back than the early part of the present century that they were superseded by the donkey-carriages, which may still be seen driven along the quiet thoroughfares. Till comparatively recent times, too, the linkextinguishers of former days remained in situ by the doors of most of the houses in Church Row, although their use had been long ago set aside by the introduction of gas.

Among the frequenters of Church Row at the beginning of the last century doubtless might have been seen Dr. William Sherlock, Dean of St. Paul's and Master of the Temple, and also Dr. Arbuthnot, the witty physician, and friend of Swift, Gay, and Pope. The former, at all events, died at Hamp

stead, in June, 1707, at the age of sixty-six. He was induced by his wife, somewhat reluctantly, to submit to William and Mary. Walking with his spouse, he was pointed at by a bookseller, who said, "There goes Dr. Sherlock with his reasons for taking the oaths on his arm." Dr. Sherlock was the author of a "Practical Treatise on Death." He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.

Dr. John Arbuthnot, of whom we have already spoken in our account of Dover Street, Piccadilly,* was for some time a resident at Hampstead. He was eminent as a wit and man of letters, even among the choice spirits of the reign of Queen Anne. Soon after coming to England from Scotland, the place of his birth, he went to practise as a physician at Dorchester, but the salubrity of the air was unfriendly to his success, and he took horse for London. A neighbour, meeting him on full gallop, asked him where he was going. "To leave your confounded place, where I can neither live nor die." His wit and pleasantry sometimes assisted his prescriptions, and in some cases superseded the necessity of prescribing. Queen Anne and her consort appointed him their physician; the Royal Society elected him a member, and the College of Physicians followed. "He gained the admiration of Swift, Pope, and Gay," writes Hone in his " Year Book," "and with them he wrote and laughed. No man had more friends, or fewer enemies; yet he did not want energy of character; he diverged from the laughter-loving mood to tear away the mask from the infamous Charitable Corporation.' He could do all things well but walk. His health declined, while his mind remained. sound to the last. He long wished for death to release him from a complication of disorders, and declared himself tired with 'keeping so much bad company.' A few weeks before his decease he wrote, 'I am as well as a man can be who is gasping for breath, and has a house full of men and women unprovided for.' . . Dr. Arbuthnot was a man of great humanity and benevolence. Swift said to Pope, 'Oh that the world had but a

* See Vol. IV., p. 292.