Chapter IX: Beating the Bounds 149 (3)

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

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

Pined
And hungered after Nature many a year
In the great City pent.

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

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

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

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

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

From _Basons_ large, the water is conveyed
By Pipes, which thence into the _Town_ are laid.
Had I but Skill, how sweetly could I play
Upon thy _Pipes_, Sir Hugh, a _Roundelay_!

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

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

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

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

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

V

ABOUT WATLING STREET

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around,
The whole a laboured quarry above ground.

The Duke was also a butt for Swift’s sneering muse. The Dean asserts that he lost by speculation what he had gained by fraud.

His wings are clipped: he tries no more in vain,
With bands of fiddlers to extend his train.

After his death the huge construction vanished like a South Sea bubble, being literally treated as a quarry for less pretentious buildings, no one caring to buy a home that had cost a quarter of a million, while the sumptuous Duke at one time cherished a project for a town palace in Cavendish Square.

As a relic of his expensive ways, the country hereabouts is still seamed with green roads which he constructed for driving himself about; then, it being no one’s business to keep them up, they have fallen into a state of picturesque abandonment, not altogether admirable in wet weather. The well-greaved pedestrian would find such a by-way on turning right from the tram-line at the end of the village to a house sentinelled by a spreading tree, where this broad, soft lane goes off on the left. When, after a mile of green solitude, it bends back towards the high road, he can take a path continuing its former direction, which leads over the fields to Edgwarebury, a most sequestered hamlet, reached on wheels by another lane from Edgware. Then beside the first house a grassy track mounts to the ridge road near Elstree, from which one has a wide prospect southwards. This road, leading from Elstree to Barnet, is here the edge of Middlesex.

From Edgware to Elstree the highway mounts for three miles, in about two gaining the top of Brockley Hill, the beauty-spot of the road, as is Highwood of the country to its right and Stanmore Common to its left. Brockley Hill is notable to philanthropists for Miss Wardell’s Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home, and to antiquaries as the supposed site of the Roman

Sulloniacæ, while all wayfarers may stop here to admire the view upon the northern heights of London. Else, the main interest of this part of Watling Street is its branches along the north side of Canons Park, then again at Brockley Hill, both for Great Stanmore, that lies about a mile to the left, Little Stanmore being an _alias_ of Whitchurch. Hence a footpath wanders across to the larger place, at the crossways outside of which one can turn up a most shady road to come out on the Common, without passing through the village.

Stanmore is a roomy and bowery place, that perhaps owes a certain air of dignified seclusion to the fact of its being reached only by a short branch of the London and North-Western Railway. The first feature that strikes one is the handsome new Church, standing beside the ivied shell of its predecessor, consecrated by Laud, in which some monuments are preserved; but there was an older church that has disappeared. One next observes that Stanmore is uncommonly well off for wealthy inhabitants, to judge by its mansions. The most illustrious of these is Bentley Priory, showing stately on the side of the wooded ridge westward. This, taking its name from an ancient monastery, has had notable owners and visitors. A century ago it was the seat of the Marquis of Abercorn, who entertained here many celebrities, among them Sir Walter Scott while he was revising the proofs of “Marmion.” After the death of William IV. Bentley Priory was occupied by Queen Adelaide, and she died here in 1849. For a time it was turned into an hotel, and when this enterprise did not prosper, the house was taken for his own residence by a well-known hotel proprietor. Stanmore Park, to the south, houses a school; and a golf-ground stretches below the partly artificial mound of Belmont, looking over to Harrow from its south edge.

On the upper side of the road, mounting beside the grounds of Bentley Priory, spreads Stanmore Common, a fine piece of heath and copsewood, whose knolls and hollows are the highest open ground in Middlesex. When the west end of the Common is left behind by the road, it rises gently to the highest point (503 feet) at the cross-roads, with an “Alpine Coffee House” for hospice. The milestone, some 200 yards ahead, marks the edge of Herts, in which the main road runs on to Bushey and Watford, with turns dropping to Harrow Weald and Pinner, and ways on the other side to Aldenham and Elstree.

At the corner of the Common behind Stanmore Hall, above the village, a path is marked for Elstree, leading down a slope and past a curious obelisk in a circle of trees, which, like the celebrated monument discovered by Mr. Pickwick, bears various interpretations, local legends varying from the tomb of Boadicea to a record of the ending of pursuit after the Battle of Barnet. The red roofs of Elstree soon come in sight, and, to the left of it, the Aldenham Lake, another canal reservoir which plays a fine part in the landscape. Elstree welcomes us into Herts and back to Watling Street, going on greenly to St. Albans, the oldest city of England, its Roman structures beheld with such wonder by rude Saxon invaders that they attributed it to the _Watling_ giants of their mythology: hence the road seems to have taken on this name.

But one might choose rather to turn towards Harrow and the scenes of our next chapter. This we can do delightfully in various ways: by the park-bordered road coming down over Harrow Weald from the highest point of Middlesex; by a beautiful path beginning near Stanmore Church, to wind at the foot of the ridge under the grounds of Bentley Priory; or by a field-way leaving the lowest road to Stanmore on the left, just as it gets out of Edgware, and holding on past Belmont to the green lanes about Kenton. The stranger needs no guidance where the far-seen spire of Harrow makes a beacon.

VI

HARROW AND PINNER

The road to Harrow is as crooked as the Edgware Road is straight. Through Paddington the former takes puzzling turns, in part forced upon it by the great railway terminus; and only beyond the “Royal Oak” station is its course clearly buoyed by red and yellow omnibuses. Browning lived in this quarter, beside the Regent’s Canal, where he found a touch of Venice; but it takes a poet’s eye to discover picturesqueness on the first stages of the Harrow Road, as it mounts between Westbourne Park and Maida Vale to a confluence of half a dozen ways at the “Prince of Wales.” Now choked by a tramway, it passes Kensal Green, London’s largest cemetery, where lie in peace all kinds of celebrities, from princes to authors, beneath a forest of tombstones, spaciously enclosed among streets, chimney stacks, gas-works, railway and canal banks, public houses for the cheering of mutes and mourners--an elaborate contrast to such a country churchyard as might make the weary soul half in love with death.

Thence our road runs on through the town that has grown up about Willesden Junction, which should properly be Harlesden; but, like Clapham Junction, this labyrinth of bridged platforms has made a wide cast for a name. A mile or two further the road is no better than a street; and when it at last gets out into fields across the Brent, the shades of building begin to close upon it again beside Wembley Park, its gaps of green soon becoming more and more filled up by the spasmodic growth of Sudbury, which seems uncertain whether it wants to tack itself on to Wembley or to Harrow. To the north is designed for it a new growth styled the Sudbury Model Garden City, whose placarded promises appear in the fields through which the highway turns shirkingly along the side of Harrow Hill. Henceforth known as the Pinner Road, this is the shortest way to the stations at the lower north end of Harrow, and gives off paths to its high quarters. But to them the arduous approach for wheels is by the loop road climbing the ridge at Sudbury Hill.

An opener way on foot towards Harrow is by the Paddington Canal, that, to the left of the road, indulges in most uncanal-like windings, so as to supply an ornament of the landscape. This may be gained beside Wormwood Scrubs, which, overcast by a gloomy prison, seems one of the least attractive parks of London; nor is the canal bank for a time more pleasant to the eye than to the nose, when one comes in wind of its refuse-destruction stations. But about Alperton it has pretty views of the heights of Ealing and Hanwell across the sinuous course of the Brent; then, as it gets below Horsendon Hill, that tiny Alp may be ascended for a prospect over green flats broken by straight railway-lines and by the curves of the canal. The most striking feature here is the cluster of red roofs on the wooded top of Harrow Hill, to which we can hold on by paths and lanes. But if we keep the canal bank, our warning to turn off for Harrow will be the group of idle chimneys at Greenford Green, the monument of a ruined industry--those aniline dyes, introduced by Sir W. H. Perkin, which have gone to be made in Germany.

The pleasantest way to Harrow is on the right of its titular road, by Willesden and Neasden. From the Edgware Road one can turn up Willesden Lane, rising as a lane of gentility, or by its loop, Brondesbury Park, leading past the Manor House, transformed into a girls’ boarding-school. This rejoins Willesden Lane where the latter has become the High Road, beyond Willesden Green Station in Walm Lane; then for a time one must bear with a tram-line and other traffic through the meaner part of the place. But at the sign of “The Case is Altered,” leaving the church quarter to the left, a way goes up by the “Spotted Dog” and the Metropolitan Station of Neasden to Neasden Green, here uniting with Dollis Hill Lane along the north side of Gladstone Park. Thence our way on to Harrow is rural--the first mile or so, indeed, being rather commonplace--down to the hollow of the Brent, and up, past the turning for Kingsbury Church, to a fork of roads at the top of Blackbird Hill. The left branch leads shadily and windingly above Wembley Park, that ambitious attempt at a north-western pleasure palace, whose stumpy Tower of Babel, long at a stick, will now cease to be a landmark and an eyesore. Beside Barn Hill, on the other hand, one bears to the left under the Metropolitan Railway, then over the London and North-Western Railway, skirting the back quarters of Sudbury, and coming into the highroad below Harrow at the well-named One Hundred Elms Farm. But, if the clay soil be not too well soaked, the pedestrian may take most of his way by field-paths through that green interval pointed out under the head of Kingsbury as refreshingly free from suburbification. I have walked across it on a fine summer evening without meeting a human being once I got off the roads.[B]

[B] In my guide _Around London_, the main paths over this interval were traced from Harrow, but not outwards, a fault that may be here repaired. The road from Willesden and Neasden forks at the top of its ascent from the Brent. Follow the right branch till it makes a sharp crook, opposite which, over a gate (left), a path mounts the side of a spacious paddock. The stile at the top opens a fine view of the Stanmore and Mill Hill heights, and henceforth the way is most truly rural. Keep the path downwards, which beyond the first hedge turns left over a stile, then, with Harrow Church in view, trends right over a large slope, and wanders into a lane beside a little bridge at Preston. A sign-post opposite shows its continuation to Kenton, crossing two foot-bridges and coming out on the road by a crooked green lane. Across the road, it is continued past Kenton Lodge by a blind by-way, at the turn of which another sign-post points the path on to Edgware. Hence its line is almost straight, made plain by stiles and wicket-gates, over a lane, past a group of red-brick hospital buildings and up a slope, from the top of which one sees Whitchurch nestling among the trees of Canons Park, and the more conspicuous tower of Edgware to the right. In the last field, near a little brook crossed by a foot-bridge, this path joins one from Edgware to Harrow, which of course would make a roundabout route from Kingsbury, yet worth taking for its long stretch of green. The direct way for Harrow is to turn left on the lane from the bridge at Preston, going up to crossways marked by a block of buildings that seem to have strayed out of a London street. Opposite this, on the right, a field-path leads to Woodcock Hill, and across the road here, by the north side of the farm, goes on to Harrow, traversing the North-Western and Metropolitan lines near where they intersect each other.

So, by one way or other, we come to Harrow Hill, on which stands up the “visible church” of Charles II.‘s little joke. This hill, or isolated ridge, not so high as Hampstead, with a slighter topping of sand, wears a trim wig of houses and gardens instead of shaggy heath, and most of it is enclosed. The openest part is about the north end, where the church spire rises so conspicuously looking across the Thames Valley to Eton and Windsor, while over smoky London the Crystal Palace may be seen, or even the tower on Leith Hill. To the eye of faith, a dozen counties lie in view. For enjoying this prospect, there are seats on the terrace outside; but the consecrated view-point is that tombstone--railed in from relic-stealing admirers, as graves in Thames-side churchyards were fortified against the ghoulism of body-snatchers--on which Byron loved to lie in pensive reverie, and to gaze at the setting sun. From his _Hours of Idleness_ it may be gathered

that the discipline of Harrow was looser in that day, when his playfellows seem to have roamed the country somewhat freely and adventurously at risk of “the rustic’s musket aimed against my life,” getting now and then into mischief, as the young poet confesses:

Nor shrunk beneath the upstart pedant’s frown,
And all the sable glories of his gown.

Their unlicensed sport of Jack-o‘-lantern hunting by night was not put down finally till long after the abolition of the once famous Silver Arrow contest. One feature in Byron’s amusements suggests poetic as well as scholastic license--“the streams where we swam” and “shared the produce of the river’s spoil.” “Ducker” was not yet made; it could hardly be the Paddington Canal that offered “buoyant billows.” “Brent’s cool wave,” if cleaner then, is a matter of three miles off at Perivale, which, as we learn from prosaic authorities, was the favourite bathing-place of that day. Such smaller streams as trickle about Harrow could yield no better spoil than sticklebacks. The one thing wanting to its prospects is a river like the “hoary Thames,” by which rival scholars,

Full many a sprightly race,
Disporting on its margin green,
The paths of pleasure trace.

About this height, shining in Dr. Parr’s eyes “with the united glories of Zion and Parnassus,” cluster the buildings of a school that stands high among “our public hives of puerile resort.” The Church had been built by Lanfranc, when “Herga” was a manor and seat of the Canterbury Primates. The School was founded under Elizabeth by John Lyon, that public-spirited squireen or yeoman of Preston, at which his house still stands, and he has a memorial in the church among other old brasses and ornaments. The tercentenary of his school came in 1871, when a fund was raised among Harrovians to add the new buildings that throw into shade their old schoolroom, boasting the names of Byron, Peel, Palmerston, and others destined to be carved on our national records. The chapel is rather older, but till two generations ago the boys attended the Parish Church. Scattered around are the boarding-houses that have sprung up about a modest nucleus; then further afield come the playing-grounds, almost as important as schoolrooms in contemporary theories of education.

Harrow has had its ups and downs; but long ago it passed out of the rank of a provincial grammar-school, and it now counts some 600 scholars who, what with work and play, have not much time for lying on tombstones and gazing at sunsets. Under rulers of Liberal sentiments, it came to be looked on as rather the Whig public school; yet, as sign of scholastic conservatism, the costume of the upper boys is still the absurd swallow-tail coat of our great-grandfathers, which produces a most incongruous effect when worn with a straw hat and flannel trousers. The Duke of Genoa, who lived with Matthew Arnold, and had the crown of Spain offered him as still a Harrow schoolboy, was precociously bearded while his rank in the school kept him in short jackets; then the arbiters of such matters were for granting him the privilege of “charity tails”; but the young Prince is understood to have refused such a distinction till earned by merit.

That pious founder would rub his eyes could he see to what has grown the school he meant, no doubt, mainly for the benefit of his neighbours’ boys, though he allowed the entrance of “foreigners,” who have ousted the natives. The sons of yeomen and tradesmen are now provided for by a humbler seminary, an inch of the endowment being appropriated to them rather than an ell. But as day-boys are admitted as well as boarders in the masters’ houses, families of the better class have been brought to settle here, to the prospering of Harrow, now expanded with a population of over 10,000, spread out in smart streets and lines of villas that run into once outlying hamlets.

Nearly two miles to the north lies Wealdstone, a village that gives a sub-title to Harrow’s railway station on the London and North Western Railway. The Metropolitan and Great Central station, distinguished as Harrow-on-the-Hill, comes a mile nearer on the same road, at Greenhill. Now the District Railway has an electric line to Roxeth, on the south side of Harrow Hill. The school authorities appear not much concerned to promote close intercourse with Metropolitan distractions; and as yet they have been able to play Canute to the trams threatening to advance from Harlesden. Therein they ill follow the example of John Lyon, who left part of his endowment for improving the roads that, on this heavy clay soil, kept waggons a whole day jolting from Harrow to London.

The meadows round the hill are traversed by foot-ways, some of them, indeed, overlaid by new roads; but there still run many pleasant paths through the fields, and Harrow’s learned masters profess to be able to find their way for a dozen miles across country, with few interruptions of macadam. By such paths, eastwards, one can make for the hamlets of Kenton and Preston, and so on to Edgware or Kingsbury over that interval of open country already mentioned. Westwards, over flatter ground, lie the leafy hamlets we shall come to presently from Pinner. Southwards are reached the still genuine villages of Northholt, Greenford, and Yeading, in that “Pure Vale” of our next chapter. Northwards the wooded brow of Harrow Weald makes a contrast of scenery, to which the straight way is by the populous road through Wealdstone and the further village called Harrow Weald, a name representing the slope of forest now trimmed and enclosed as private parks. Through these the road leads up to the “Hare,” where to the left opens Harrow Weald Common, and a mile further on the cross-roads at the edge of Bushey Heath mark that highest point of Middlesex we have already reached from Stanmore.

It is a good hour’s walk from Harrow Church to its lofty common. Feet impatient of road-tramping can reach it a little more deviously by turning off to the left, nearly a mile beyond Wealdstone, at the “Alma.” This path may seem not very promising at first, but it bends as a bit of road round an enclosure, and ends as a green lane leading up to the road through Hatch End at the foot of the ridge. On the other side of this road, a few paces to the right, opens a narrow path, converging with a better one that goes off through wicket-gates at the corner in the other direction, towards Pinner. This mounts up to a farm and thence to a pretty hamlet bearing the nickname “Harrow Weald City,” beside which one gets on to the Common, a broken and roughly-wooded expanse commanding fine views from its knolls and edges. At the west end is the park enclosure of Graeme’s Dyke House, the home of Mr. W. S. Gilbert, who here figures as a grave magistrate and substantial squire, but elsewhere has dealt in “magic and spells.” The name he spells so is from Grim’s Dyke, a very ancient rampart which has been held to mark the limit of Belgic intrusion among Celtic tribes; but the same name belongs to similar works in other parts of England, and the origin of this one seems uncertain. It may be traced as a slight swell in the meadows to the right of a road hence descending to join Oxhey Lane, the way for Watford, across which a path along the Dyke holds on to Pinner.

The highroad from Harrow to Pinner is not very pleasing in its first stage; but here again the pedestrian may turn a little out of his way with advantage. A lane to the right, near the Recreation Ground, brings him up to the Headstone, now a picturesquely moated farm, once a seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury; and thence a field-path rambles greenly on to Pinner Church. On the other side of the highroad, one could have taken a path, westward from the cricket field below Harrow Church, to the rifle butts, where it ends as a lane presently crooking north to lead into the shady outskirts of Pinner.