Chapter IX: Beating the Bounds 149 (2)

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.

III

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

To not every Londoner of this generation is the Great North Road as well known even by name as the Great Northern Railway running near it. The highway that led so many a hopeful youth across the northern heights, to see the lights of London at last shining before him, has more than once shifted its course, and now falls into the Metropolis by a delta of branches, among which one might be at a loss to pick out the main stream. Its original course seems to have been by Hornsey, Muswell Hill, Colney Hatch, and Friern Barnet, where it may still be followed as a pleasant byway of winding ups and downs joining the present road at Whetstone. That chain of muddy, rutty lanes, as it was in old days, becoming worn out by traffic, the Bishops of London, through whose land it passed, made a new road straight over Highgate Hill. Those spiritual stepfathers were more concerned about collecting their tolls than sparing horseflesh; but, as Bishops ceased to be great lords, both clergymen and laymen began to have a conscience of what is due to animals. Proposals to divert the road round this trying steep were for a time baffled by the opposition of landowners holding jealously to their parked seclusion. Not till about a century ago was constructed the road which skirts Highgate Hill on the east, at first meant to be carried out through a tunnel on a smaller scale, like the grotto leading from Naples to Pozzuoli. The tunnel, however, fell in before it was opened, and gave place to a deep cutting spanned by the archway on which Hornsey Lane crosses it, a structure recently rebuilt. This Archway Road, as it is called, may claim to be the main northern highway. But motorists and cyclists from the West End are much more familiar with the Finchley Road that, passing on the other side of Hampstead Heath, converges with the eastern line at North Finchley.

Finchley is a very wide word, as I can tell, who, while yet a stranger to Middlesex, paying a visit here, found myself let in for a dark walk of over half a dozen miles to the Finchley Road Station. Even further this parish spreads along the lower heights beyond Hampstead and Highgate, including dependencies with by-names of their own. Till enclosed early in last century, it contained much open land, like that Finchley Common famed in Hogarth’s picture and in the Newgate Calendar; Sydney Smith calls it the most notorious haunt of highwaymen in England when he was young, as Tom Jones and Partridge had reason to understand. A rough patch of it still holds out on the right hand of the eastern road, but hardly large enough to parade a regiment of the Guards, or to

afford a stage for any thrilling chase of Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard. The airy high ground once used for military encampments is now set with strings and knots of houses, grouping themselves most thickly at three points--Church End, East Finchley, and North Finchley--the last-named being the apex of the triangle they form, and the first the nucleus of the parish.

Between these straggling suburbs are still green fields, groves of elm and beech, and footway hints of vanishing rusticity; while much of the ground has been taken up by huge cemeteries on the heights once clearly outside of London. Electric trams and motor-buses seem at present in need of a good word, which they might have from anyone who had seen the Great North Road before its tram-line was made. Two or three years ago a pitiable sight here on hot Sunday afternoons was groups of flower-burdened women in black, waiting to struggle for room on the insufficient public vehicles that tugged heavy loads towards the resting-places of their dead. Where so many sad and weary mourners were often disappointed of a lift, tramcars from Holloway now spin by the gates of the adjacent Islington and St. Pancras burying-grounds. The Finchley Road is not yet laid with rails; but up it steer a fleet of motor-buses that have their haven at the “Swan and Pyramids” in North Finchley, some of them voyaging southwards as far as the distant “Elephant and Castle.”

The Finchley Road emerges into open country at Child’s Hill, just beyond the London boundary. Further back, indeed, near the cemetery at Fortune Green to the left of the road, there is a most rustic-looking farm and a fine old avenue, making the first stage of a field-way to Hendon, soon spoiled by a sewage farm and an isolation hospital, but recovering from this infection when it has crossed the Brent. The road to Hendon turns left from the highway through the village and string of villas called Golder’s Green, a name that takes in the red-brick tower on the right, marking the new Golder’s Green Crematorium, beside a Jewish cemetery, five miles from the Marble Arch. The tube railway passing under Hampstead Hill now threatens to break up this pleasant stretch of the road, where at present lanes and paths run off to Hendon and the Brent Valley. So London stretches its tentacles towards Hendon, as yet swimming freely on its sea of green bounded by the Finchley and the Edgware Road, from which latter we shall visit it further on.

From the hamlet of Temple Fortune, with its “Royal Oak” bus station, where a rash suburb seems to have budded too early, the road, again as yet between hedges, mounts for a long mile to Finchley’s Church End and G.N. Railway-station. Here, nearly six miles from Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Finchley Road behoves to be known as the Regent’s Park Road. The little Church, containing some old brasses, stands to the left on a road coming in from Hendon, where it has been rather dwarfed by Christ’s College opposite, once a semi-private school, now acquired by the local authorities. In the pleasant churchyard the most noticeable tomb is an obelisk over Major Cartwright, that firebrand of Radical reform in his day, who in ours, perhaps, might pass for a cautious Conservative.

Church End has still some traces of its village life; but most of Finchley is a suburb of too monotonous respectability, now overshadowing our road for a couple of miles or more. On the west side it drops to the course of the Dollis Brook, the Brent’s longest stream, beyond which the swelling ground lies still open in meadows or parks, with green lanes and footpaths leading over to the ridges of Mill Hill and Totteridge. From Nether Street, for instance--the valley road parallel with the highway--by a lodge gate is marked an avenued footway for Mill Hill, that leads finely across the Dollis Brook to mount on a golf-course beside the grounds of Nether Court. It seems as if all the parks of Middlesex are like to be usurped upon by that greedy game of golf, so much more at ease in its native barrens, or on the heaths of Surrey. There may soon be as many clubs of Londoners as in all Scotland; and yet a bitter cry goes up from long waiting-lists of would-be members, eager to find room on links of any pretensions. Of such a candidate it is told that, in his impatience, he addressed the secretary, asking whether his admission were barred by social ineligibility or by want of “form,” and received on a postcard the curt reply, _Both_. But if we drop into golf stories, our progress along the North Road will be bunkered; so from this hint of an attractive deviation let us return to its macadam. The word is “Fore!”

At Tally-Ho Corner, about a mile beyond Church End, the Finchley Road converges with the main highway coming by the “Bald Faced Stag” of East Finchley, with cemeteries and other prospects on its right. Past the seven-mile-stone there is an ascent to the turning for Colney Hatch at Fallow Corner, where the top of tramcars gives a wide view towards the Alexandra Palace. To the right here lies some pleasant scenery about the great asylum of Colney Hatch, name worthy of a better fame, which its conscious dwellers would fain dissemble under the undimmed title of New Southgate. But, on the whole, this makes a less pleasing way than the other.

From North Finchley the united roads run on another long mile between houses, a remarkable number of them public-houses and other places of refreshment. Thus we pass imperceptibly into Whetstone, where comes in Friern Lane from Muswell Hill, by Colney Hatch and Friern Barnet, which is the oldest and prettiest, but not now the busiest, way out of North London. By-roads and paths go off on this side, over the Great Northern main line, towards Southgate and East Barnet. On the other side, where runs the branch line to High Barnet, one can soon strike across to the quiet amenities of Totteridge; and from Totteridge station, close to the highroad, a path leads on up the Dollis Brook to High Barnet. But when the road itself brings us again into something like open country, it passes for a time out of Middlesex, its boundary here so labyrinthine that one has known a very policeman doubtful as to which county he was patrolling. Between Totteridge and Barnet a long forked tongue of Hertfordshire is thrust into Middlesex, licking up some of the fairest scenes hereabouts for a county that has no need to be greedy of loveliness. It is thus that our shire’s waist becomes pinched up to a breadth of about eight miles, between Colney Hatch and the Thames. The North Road crosses the border more than a mile short of High Barnet, where for a time the tramway stopped at the top of a hill, as if taking breath to mount the steeper rise into the town, in the upper part of which we come back into Middlesex. On this ascent into Barnet, by its railway station, almost for the first time we get on either hand wide and open views of the fine landscapes that have been too much butchered to make London homes and holidays.

Barnet is another widespread name. Friern Barnet--Friar’s Barnet--was site of a monastery, now two or three miles behind us to the east of our road. A mile or two north of this lies East Barnet, with its suburban outgrowth, Oakleigh Park. Modest as East Barnet looks, its secluded old Church seems to have been the core of all the Barnets. A little way further north, on the main line of the Great Northern Railway, New Barnet has become a distant Metropolitan suburb overlaying the hamlet of Lyonsdown. Then, a mile to the west, eleven miles from Clerkenwell, Chipping Barnet--_i.e._, _Cheaping_ or Market Barnet--answering to the _alias_ of High Barnet by its elevation of 400 feet, still shows character as an old independent town, especially about the far-seen tower and spirelet of its restored church, on the brow of the ridge. Here goes off westward an airy road to Elstree, leading in a couple of miles by Arkley to Barnet Gate, a mere hamlet about an old windmill and an inn, from which a very rural footpath edges a by-road to Highwood and Mill Hill.

Towards the parallel ridge of Totteridge, building is transforming Arkley Common, where were the once-sought Barnet Wells, visited by Pepys in 1667, who “there found many people a-drinking”; but half a century later Defoe records how the credit of this spa had dried up, the more accessible waters of Hampstead and Islington having come into vogue. Till the present day Barnet has kept the notoriety of its fair in September, the trade of which is drowned in a carnival of blended Cockney rascality and bucolic dissipation, so that it seems time to put down this blatant survival from when the town was practically as far off London as York is now. It will be remembered that at Barnet Oliver Twist fell in with that compromising companion, the “Artful Dodger,” who, at the fair time, was likely enough to have business here. Dickens is said to have had Barnet again in view as “Thistledown,” at which he denounced the mismanagement of a “Free” Grammar School, such as in his day so often gave cause for scandal. But unless that the way to it led up a hill, where on either side the fields were “puffed up into notice by a series of undulations,” his description as little answers to the Barnet of our day as to its rebuilt and reformed school beside the Church. The town enjoys several charitable foundations, from the seventeenth-century Jesus Hospital, designed for such old women as are not sorcerers, witches, tale-bearers, back-biters, drunkards, lunatics or otherwise objectionable, to the modern Leathersellers’ Almshouses on the Elstree road. Its “Red Lion,” “Green Man,” and other ancient hostelries are further hints of a prosperity fed by the traffic of the Great North Road, which here throws off a hardly less-renowned branch to Holyhead.

Barnet is famed in history for the battle, 1471, where, as an old schoolmaster of mine puts it in a well-known school history, “every petal of the Red Rose was shattered from its stem”--a botanical metaphor to puzzle unimaginative schoolboys, who perhaps know more of this battle from Bulwer Lytton’s _Last of the Barons_. Running on through the cheerful High Street, and by the common called Hadley Green, our road forks for St. Albans and for Hatfield at a triangular patch of grass on which an obelisk marks the traditional scene of Warwick’s death. The battle-field seems to have been mainly to the right of the road, on Hadley Common, to which one turns off from the upper corner of Hadley Green, where the town almost runs into the village of Monken Hadley, with its ancient Church. As a rarer relic than its monuments, this restored, or rather rebuilt, church keeps on its tower a cresset that may often have served for beacon to wanderers in the wilds of Enfield Chase, and no doubt did its part in spreading the alarm of the Armada, for at Hadley we are on one of the highest levels of Middlesex, in view of “bleak Hampstead’s swarthy moor,” where Macaulay starts the chain of fire-signals that would run to the north till “the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle.” Close to the church will be seen the railed-in stump of an oak, haunted by misty memories of one Friar Bungay, whom Bulwer Lytton makes to figure in his story; but this personage seems to have lived more than a century earlier, and to have shared the fate of Roger Bacon as being dubbed a sorcerer, through scientific curiosity in advance of their age. For an elm not far off is cherished a tradition of Latimer’s preaching under it; and if so, it must be a very patriarch of elms.

Hadley Common, Barnet’s most beautiful purlieu, is the largest unenclosed fragment of Enfield Chase, a strip of woodland, interspersed with greensward, stretching for two miles along the ridge north-east of the town, all whose sweetheart couples might be lost in its bosky mazes. One can thread them by taking the road turning off at that venerable stump, to become a bridle-track along the edge of the woods, joined about half-way by a path coming up from New Barnet Station. This way is sacred to the pedestrian, though the cyclist is tolerated, if he care to plough through the roughness of its further end. It debouches at Cock Fosters, now a pretty hamlet of gentility about the inn which was once, no doubt, a resort of foresters, standing just off the road from Southgate to Potter’s Bar.

As hitherto he has seen so little of the country from closed-in highroads, the reader who has got to High Barnet on wheels might be glad to take his way homewards by a roundabout track that, safe from the proud dust of motor-cars, makes one of the greenest walks so near London, with fine prospects on all the Barnets. His first stage is along Hadley Common to Cock Fosters; then, by the spire of the church behind the inn, he will find a footpath which, crossing a road enters Oak Hill Park and drops over the Pymmes Brook to a road past the isolated church of East Barnet. At the Manor House here James Thomson is said to have been tutor, and he might still find scenes for the rural pictures of his _Seasons_, preserved by private grounds on the slopes opposite this church, half hidden in its shady enclosure. Behind it the Church Farm has been turned into the Philanthropic Society’s Industrial School, by which goes a path that, beyond the Great Northern Railway main line, soon loses itself in the new roads of Oakleigh Park, leading into the highway at Whetstone. Perhaps a pleasanter way, as things are now, is to keep the road past the church till on its right runs up an embowered lane straggling across the railway into a road from Colney Hatch, on which one turns right for the tram-line. This round of some five miles from Barnet takes one roughly along the edge of that inlet of Hertfordshire, that, indeed, extends to Colney Hatch, a mile or two further south. Almost opposite the “embowered lane” mentioned above, goes off a turn in the other direction, which, crossing the Pymmes Brook, mounts past the opening of a trim path to Southgate. But I fear to confuse my _guidees_ in pointing out all the green ways still open on this side of the Great North Road here.

To return from our digression backwards: in the upper part of Barnet the Great North Road re-enters Middlesex to traverse its bluff north-eastern promontory. Here the road is a truly great one, well laid, well bordered, and well provided with guide posts giving not only directions, but distances on the by-ways. From the obelisk at the fork it skirts on the left Wrotham Park, the seat of the unlucky Admiral Byng, its woods hiding a white mansion that looks out conspicuously from the other side. To the right appears in a hollow the suburban smartness of Hadley Wood, a new quarter grown up about its station on the main Great Northern Railway line, which presently tunnels under our road. By Ganwick Corner and the “Duke of York,” we come to Potter’s Bar, the last Middlesex village, much transmogrified through villas and trim suburban roads, by which London breaks out again on the edge of its shire. This is three miles from Barnet, and five or six miles more through “pleasant Hertfordshire” would bring us to Hatfield, whence this road holds on by fat midlands, skirting fens and wolds, over fells and moors, through dales and glens, till at last it must be brought to a stand by the rushing tide of the Pentland Firth, after giving so many stages of scenery and adventure for imagination. I think it is Mr. John Buchan who insists how, among the world’s roads, the breath of romance blows stronger on those pointing to the Pole than on those belting the same latitude and hugging the same isobar.

The station of Potter’s Bar lies a mile or so to the left, reached by an avenue-like way opening nearly opposite the “Old Robin Hood.” This station also serves South Mimms, a goodly village with an old church, but not set in such rich surroundings as its neighbour, North Mimms, across the Hertford border. The direct way to South Mimms is the Holyhead Road, turning off from Barnet High Street at the “Green Man,” which is all that a highway should be; but not much more can be said of it unless for its peep into Dyrham Park at the Dancers Hill cross-roads. Above the thirteenth mile-stone and the crossing of the Mimms Brook the pedestrian may look out for a group of farm buildings on the left, by which a path, crossing the road here, curves over fields to Clare Hall and a hospital near the south end of North Mimms. There a lane to the left, or a path a little further, leads out of Middlesex to the hamlet of Ridge, through whose churchyard begins another field-path running after a mile almost into the picturesque Hertfordshire village of Shenley; then a park-enclosed road of two miles more leads to the Midland station of Radlett on Watling Street.

But one must not be tempted to stray into another county, else much might be said of the road that turns right at the Potter’s Bar Police Station for Northaw, Cheshunt, and Enfield. From Potter’s Bar, on this side, another finely-bordered highway turns back to London, through what was once Enfield Chase, by Cock Fosters and Southgate. At the leafy hollow, where a large board beacons to Hadley Wood Station, one can turn by it for a walk of two miles to Barnet, pleasantly reached over the upper part of Hadley Common.

The cross-road in the other direction leads in three miles to Enfield and the scenes of our next chapter, passing the north side of Trent Park, which got its exotic name from George III., when he gave a lease of it to Sir Richard Jebb, in reward for his services to one of the royal princes on a sick-bed at the Tyrolese Trent. Where the road touches the park, over the fence may be seen the remains of Camelot Moat, an overgrown enclosure of immemorial antiquity that makes one of the scenes in the _Fortunes of Nigel_. A later novelist may have picked up a hint here in the legend of such a “Lost Sir Massingberd” as is said to have hid himself in a hollow tree and perished miserably by falling into a well underneath. By the country-folk Camelot Moat seems best remembered as one of Dick Turpin’s lairs; but all over the county linger memories of this worthy, whose spirit on rough nights haunts its lonely roads from Enfield Chase to Stanmore Heath, or did so till quite recently, when it is understood to have taken offence at the passage of motor-cars as not easily brought to “stand and deliver.”

IV

EDMONTON AND ENFIELD

An older road north is the line of the ancient Ermyn Street, running out roughly parallel with the Great Eastern Railway to Cambridge, by the Middlesex side of the Lea. Defoe styles this the North Road, and states that more carriages came that way in his time than on any other road into London. But there are Londoners of our day to whom it is unknown beyond Shoreditch; and few foreigners find it out, though Americans might see here perhaps our best effort at one of their long city avenues. It is not, indeed, as long as Yonge Street, Toronto, which has laid itself out for thirty miles as a shadow cast before future greatness, and it may be surpassed by the “magnificent distances” of Washington or Philadelphia; still, this modest London thoroughfare holds an almost straight course for half a dozen miles from Shoreditch, past Dalston and Stoke Newington, over Stamford Hill, and through Tottenham to Edmonton. Here it makes a slight bend from the line of the ancient road; that a little to the left may still be traced in grassy and sloughy stretches beside fragments of woodland, where one might believe oneself many miles from a busy highway. But for a few green gaps, which seem in the way of being filled up, the actual road as far as the edge of Hertfordshire and beyond has been shut in with houses, often spreading out so far on either side that the Edmonton census district is the most populous part of Middlesex outside London. Edmonton’s name included one of the county’s half-dozen Hundreds, which, in the more practical grouping for parliamentary representation, is divided under the titles of Enfield and Tottenham; while Enfield, for its part, holds the distinction of being the largest Middlesex parish.

This is the road on which fared Hobson, the Cambridge carrier of Milton’s day, whose rule that each horse must be hired in turn as it stood in the stable is said to have originated the phrase “Hobson’s choice.” It has also memories of Dick Turpin, who, according to the legend recorded by Harrison Ainsworth, leapt Black Bess clean over a donkey-cart at Edmonton as he spurred on to Ware, with the myrmidons of the law in hot pursuit. Another criminal hero of the neighbourhood was the pickpocket George Barrington, transported to Botany Bay in 1790, where he reformed himself to become a police superintendent, an author, even a poet, known by one trite couplet--

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

“Stop, thief! Stop, thief! A highwayman!” was the 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 “in a 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 the _peau de chagrin_ in 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 the _alias_ of 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 quotation would 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 another doubtful 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 mop
Or 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 such tricks 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

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 Lanes _par excellence_ can 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 of their 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 of a 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 days when 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

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’s _Recollections of Writers_ are 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’s _Table 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 companion piece to John Gilpin, which should deal with his wife’s adventures while hanging about the “Bell.”

Then Mrs. Gilpin sweetly said
Unto 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-by
A spectacle and show;

Who said, “Your spouse and you this day
Both 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 his _New 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,” and may 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: