Chapter IX: Beating the Bounds 149 (4)

Pinner is a good old village that has taken a vigorous new growth on the stalk of the Metropolitan Railway, rooted in the business quarters of London. It still keeps an air of rustic charm among the sophistications of villadom, and it is ringed about with parks and pretty hamlets--Pinner Green further on the road, Eastcote to the south, Woodridings and Hatch End to the north, connected by crooked lanes and green paths, which, indeed, begin to be too often cut up by builders. Its heart may be marked at the station of the Metropolitan line, which here plays the part of landlord as well as carrier. From the railway and the Pin brook, turns up the main street, showing some old houses, real and artificial, as it mounts to the Church, an ancient one, altered and restored with picturesque effect in its shady nook. In the churchyard stands prominent the ivy-wreathed tomb of William Loudon, a Scotsman, who a century ago had the whim of directing that he should be buried above ground, as he is in this curious structure. It is more than a mile on to the London and North Western station, which, near a lordly pile of Commercial Travellers’ schools, marks the north purlieus of the place, whence one can ascend to Harrow Weald and Bushey Heath by Grim’s Dyke or by the path from Hatch End already mentioned.

On this rising ground it is less easy to miss one’s way; but I despair of helping my reader not to lose himself in the labyrinth of shady roads, muddy, grassy lanes and bowery paths that lead southwards and westwards from Pinner, through a delightful country, difficult to describe without a repetition of hackneyed epithets. The best I can do is to recommend him to No. 1 of a little series of penny guides published at the booking offices of the Metropolitan Railway, in which he has a selection of these ways traced for him; or he might find the west section of my guide _Around London_ of use, like other pathfinders of the kind. But the advice I should give myself, if at leisure on a fine day, would simply be to get lost in a leafy maze dotted with guide-posts to keep one from going far astray, even without the help of map and compass.

One ramble of two or three hours to be suggested is by a chain of old-world villages, such as often surprise one in this populous county, as do quaint, tumbledown cottages here and there preserved like flies in the amber of a spick-and-span suburb. But how long will these hamlets keep their rusticity, now that they are threaded by the Metropolitan branch to Uxbridge, not to speak of the new Great Central and Great Western joint line to Wycombe? Before the foul breath of London has blighted them, let my client, by one of two or three ways, make for Eastcote, a most rustic straggling of cottages a mile or two south-west from Pinner. When he has got to the end of this village on the road to Ruislip, a bridge on the right shows him where to take a field-path along a brook, then under the edge of the large Park Wood, in which is set Ruislip Lake, another of those canal reservoirs that make such a fine show in Middlesex. It lies to the west side of the wood, through which a way to it might be found from Pinner Green or from the “Ship” of Eastcote.

The village of Ruislip stands to the south of Park Wood, where the Church shows its flint tower set on a rise among fat farms, beside the course of the brook we have followed from Eastcote. This low height marks a watershed, for the brook wanders on by Ickenham and Hillingdon to the Colne, whereas the streams on the other side unite to make the Crane. Ruislip Church is dedicated to St. Martin, as may be guessed from a niched figure on the west front representing that charitable soldier in the act of dividing his cloak; and from its size one may understand how it was no ordinary parish church, but connected with a monastic community, whose land here passed into the hands of a Cambridge college. It ranks among the finest village churches in the county, the parish itself being larger and more populous than appears from the picturesque knot of houses clustered about this central point. The churchyard commands a pleasant prospect over swells of wood and meadow, that fall to duller aspects, cut off by the Metropolitan branch passing to the south of the village.

By a passage beside the picturesque old “Swan,” opposite the Church, there is a way across Ruislip Park, on whose privacy the builder has set seals of doom. This leads into the road for Ickenham, about a mile off, beyond the Great Western Railway station for both villages, each of them having an adjacent “halt” of the Metropolitan line, that begins to sow suburban villas on the fields it has ploughed up, where as yet real cottages bear their crop of ruddy cheeks and hobnailed boots. Ickenham seems a still quieter and quainter hamlet than Ruislip; and its old Church’s shingled spire, set among time-weathered tombs, makes a better match with the surroundings than does the baronial pump by the pond opposite. This, like a true country village, lies under the squirely shadow of Swakeleys, the best-preserved seventeenth-century manor-hall left in Middlesex, if Holland House be put out of account. It was built by a city father shortly before the Civil War, soon after which, when in the hands of another Lord Mayor, it came to be visited with due admiration by Mr. Pepys, who saw there one odd sight, the body of a black boy which his master had dried to keep in a box. The only fault the garrulous diarist had to find with the place was as “not very modern in the garden nor house, but the most uniform in all that ever I saw.”

Swakeleys may be brought to sight by taking a footpath opposite the parsonage, beyond Ickenham Church, which leads into the park. After crossing several stiles, one can follow the right branch of the path into the drive, passing along the course of a stream that here forms an artificial sheet of water, across which the mansion shows its mellowed front. On coming out of the park, one finds a rising footway on the left, marked “Uxbridge,” which in a mile or so leads to the east end of the town by a road coming over the high ground of Uxbridge Common; or Belmont Road, diverging on the right, would emerge near the west end, passing the Metropolitan Station. Instead of making for Uxbridge from the gate above mentioned, one might turn back by a track through Swakeley Park, giving an excellent view of the mansion from the south-west, well seen also, when the leaves are off, from the lodge on the road between Ickenham and Uxbridge, into which this path leads. A branch of the same road takes one through the Hillingdon Parks to the Uxbridge tram-line, struck a mile or so short of the town, at what is the most Arcadian reach of this rather useful than ornamental highway.

Ruislip and Ickenham may also be gained from Northwood, the next station on the Metropolitan main line, three miles beyond Pinner, where London has again sown a thicket of suburban avenues among patches of wild wood and banks of sand. By the golf-links, to the left of the high-road, a path leads past Ruislip Lake and its woods to an outlying hamlet visited by modest tea-feasters, from which it is a short mile to Ruislip Church; or just beyond Northwood Church, further on, one can take a road to Ickenham or Uxbridge, passing over Duck’s Hill, through reaches of wood, then almost touching the lake at the hamlet above mentioned, where, by its “Six Bells,” goes off to the right a path for Harefield. On old maps one observes how large a stretch of this leafy ground is Ruislip Common, and it may be as well not to ask how so much of it came to be enclosed as game preserves and such-like.

On the other side of the Metropolitan Railway at Northwood, the Hertfordshire border is marked by the Oxhey Woods, through which one might ramble on past the secluded Oxhey Chapel, and near the London and North-Western main line as a guide to Watford. The high-road reaches the edge of Middlesex at the top of the ascent beyond Northwood Church, where it comes out on Batchworth Heath, a spacious village green about the gates of Moor Park. Here, from an open height of about 350 feet, there is a view over Harrow Hill upon London and the Surrey hills beyond; and hence, by a right of way across the park, one can walk on to Rickmansworth. But to keep in Middlesex one must turn left from the high-road on to high ground over the valley of the Colne, with the Grand Junction Canal running beside it as the straightest way to Uxbridge.

These are only hints of rambles in this hilly and thickly-wooded north-western corner, which one is tempted to proclaim as the _bouquet_ of the county’s scenery. But then, one had another opinion when fresh from the parks and meadows of the north-eastern corner beyond Enfield, or from Hampstead Heath, or from the high ground about Stanmore. Without attempting to adjudge the golden apple among such rivals, let us next turn to a part of Middlesex that can put in no claim to the prize of beauty, although Cobbett _faisait des siennes_ in spurning its flats as “all ugly.”

VII

THE WESTERN ROADS

On the somewhat flat south-western corner of Middlesex, the most zealous advocate may find it more difficult to call evidence to character than on behalf of its northern heights. Yet cyclists and horses might have a good word to say for this plain, over which three main arteries of traffic run from the west end of London--the Uxbridge road, the Great Western road by Slough, and the South-Western road diverging from the latter at Hounslow. Along these highways let us string the spots of interest and beauty that must be confessed to make oases in a part of the county describable as attending rather strictly to business.

From Shepherd’s Bush the Uxbridge road is distinguished by the first long line of electric trams that led out of London to the furthest edge of Middlesex. The Metropolitan boundary is soon crossed as this tram slides into Acton Vale, to the right of which a shabby fragment of Old Oak Common, adjoining Wormwood Scrubs, was once a resort for its mineral wells; and in our own generation a futile attempt was made at setting up here a popular pleasure ground. It looks for a little as if the road were getting into open country, but soon the streets of Acton undeceive us, stretching on to Ealing. This _Oak Town_, whose first record is as pasture-ground for the Bishop of London’s pigs, has had noble and notable residents in its time, Baxter’s _Saints’ Rest_ having been written here, as well as some of Bulwer Lytton’s novels. At present it is not an Elysian suburb, even its open spaces being much enclosed as athletic arenas; but it has two bits of park on either side of the highway, and turning up Horn Lane from the rebuilt Church, one comes on a hollow called the Steyne, that gives some hint what the place was in its village simplicity. The pleasantest part of it seems Acton Green, a mile to the south, bordering the “æsthetic” amenities of Bedford Park.

At the west end of Acton, just before the road reaches Ealing Common, stood Fordhook, Fielding’s house, at one time occupied by Byron’s widow, that only since the coming of the tram has given place to homes for reformed Tom Joneses and respectable Pamelas of our generation. Among these spick-and-span houses, the name of a brand-new road, Twyford Avenue, invites the pedestrian to a rural digression. At the top of it, what is still a hedged path leads on under the slope of Hangerhill, a park on which golf has laid its privy paw as on so many about London. This path debouches beside the open space enclosed as Park Royal to make a permanent show-ground for the Royal Agricultural Society, an experiment that proved a failure. Passing to the left, one soon reaches Twyford Abbey on the bank of the Brent, where green slopes and the remains of a fine avenue seem threatened on all sides. To this smallest parish near London a tributary brook gives the name so common among England’s double fords. The modern mansion, titled on surmise of an abbey having once stood here, has quite recently deserved its name by passing to a community of foreign monks, whom the whirligig of time brings to seek refuge in our heretical island. These Catholic owners fail to provide a parson for the adjacent extraparochial chapel or miniature church, that does no credit to the Anglican Establishment. For want of a congregation as well as an officiant, Twyford Church stands secluded in silent decay, not yet come to the point of picturesqueness, its windows broken, its graves neglected, the path leading to it choked by weeds. Hence, turning a mile or so westward down the Brent, one reaches another of the many “smallest churches in England,” whose name, Perivale, has been interpreted as _Parva_; but in old books it bears more than one _alias_, “Peryfare” and “Purevale.”

The Pure Vale seems to have been a title of admiration given to the rich valley south of Harrow--a name which must have had a wider extent than this tiny parish, if Drayton kept within the bounds of poetic license in making the Colne perceive Perivale “pranked up with wreaths of wheat.” This whole countryside was long famed for wheat, as it now is for hay; and Fuller says of Perivale, what has also been boasted for Heston, near Southall, that it had the honour of supplying flour for the King’s table. Perivale Church is in very different case from its luckless neighbour, its ancient structure well restored and well cared for; and, while each parishioner of the tiny parish might have a couple of pews to himself, on summer Sundays it seldom lacks an overflowing congregation taking excuse for a stroll from Ealing. Ealing, indeed, grows towards it across a green flat, on which the Brent makes sinuous windings as natural hazards for a golf-course.

One might hence follow the river on a byroad, circumventing the tram-line through Ealing and Hanwell, two adjacent places as to which the story is told of Thackeray’s--or who was it?--suggestion to the railway authorities that the porters should be changed who proclaimed them as _H_ealing and ‘Anwell. Ealing is such a favourite residential suburb that it now extends for two miles along the road, and on either side has turned private grounds and mansions into streets and playgrounds. On the right rises the dignified quarter of Castlebar Hill, over which are ways to the new park on the Brent; on the left lies Ealing Common, then, further on, Walpole Park, with its fine old timber, thrown open since the death of Miss Perceval, sister of the murdered Prime Minister, who survived to the beginning of this century as a link with days when Ealing was a Middlesex village, not yet a cantonment of Anglo-Indians and the like. It is not so over-built but that patches of green and pleasant foot-ways are still found about a place which can boast to be the

birthplace of Huxley and the burial-place of John Horne Tooke. A noted private school here had in its day such pupils, destined to varied fame, as Charles Knight, Thackeray, Newman, and the Lawrence brothers. Bulwer Lytton also was pupil of a clergyman, with whom he seems to have got on less ill than with most of his instructors. In the upper part of Ealing, near its conspicuous water-tower, stands the Princess Helena College, which has made its mark in the new education of girls; and there are other flourishing schools that now may be rearing the philosophers, novelists, and statesmen of the next generation.

We need not ask too closely where Hanwell begins, this suburb being a little shy of its name, shadowed by a huge County Lunatic Asylum, which really belongs to the more idyllic parish of Norwood, to the south. Perhaps the cemeteries on either side of the high-road may be taken as the junction-point, and we are certainly in Hanwell when the tram-road makes an abrupt drop to cross the valley of the Brent. A little way below, the river becomes merged with the Grand Junction Canal, descending at the back of the Asylum by a chain of locks which recall those of Trollhatta or Banavie on a small scale, beside what seems a miniature edition of the Great Wall of China. Walking to Brentford on the tow-path for a couple of miles, one might fancy oneself in the heart of a rather common-place country, where straggling curls of the tamed river show scum almost as green as its banks; but the solitude is disturbed by a tram-line close at hand.

If that by-way is not very attractive, up the Brent one can turn through one of the prettiest bits of Izaac Waltondom so near London. The ground on this side is laid out as a park below the tall viaduct of the Great Western Railway, whose passengers have such a good view of the isolated Church. Behind the church starts a path making a chord to the vagrant bends of the Brent, till the stream turns eastwards beside a road towards Perivale. Across this road the path holds on to the old Church of Greenford, that has some notable relics under its shingled spire and tiled roof, showing through a clump of trees which help the green meadows to bear out the name of the village. The road through Greenford goes on to Harrow by Greenford Green, whose name does not so well answer to its promise of rusticity. But over the fields beside Greenford Church one may take a mile of footpath leading across the canal to Northholt, _alias_ Northall, another of those real, quaint, roomy villages that surprise one in out-of-the-way nooks about London, saved from the builder, perhaps, by a heavy clay soil that makes bricks to deface less secluded parishes. As unspoiled as the village seems its weather-worn little Church, standing on a knoll beside the broad sward of roads knotting themselves together here. Northwards one finds a charming path that, ending as a green lane, leads almost into the south suburbs of Harrow. In the other direction the canal bank would bring us back to the road at Southall.

There was a Southholt once, which, corrupted by the evil communications of the high-road, has changed its name as well as its nature. I can remember Southall when it could still be called a pleasant country nook, half village, half distant suburb; but in one generation it has waxed to what it is now, a somewhat commonplace outgrowth of London, which for a time was the tram terminus. It has a weekly cattle market as its most bucolic feature; and there are still some pleasant fields to be found on either side. And that is all to be said about Southall, unless that beside it unite the two branches of the Grand Junction Canal, hence running on straight to West Drayton, where it turns north up the valley of the Colne.

Across the Paddington arm of the canal the highroad comes upon veritable turnip-fields, as it goes on to Uxbridge, passing the hamlets of Hayes, a scattered village whose manor-house made one of the Archbishops of Canterbury’s many seats, the dignity of which seems to survive in the spacious parsonage. The fine restored Church contains some old monuments, notably, beside the altar, Sir Edward Fenner’s tomb with coloured effigy; it has also a much-faded wall painting of St. Christopher in the north aisle, and a discarded altar-piece representing the “Adoration of the Magi.”

Hayes Town, as the church precinct styles itself, lies to the left of the way, down a turning opposite the “Adam and Eve.” On the right the Yeading brook waters a stretch where itself seems the pleasantest feature. Here comes another of those odd blanks in the map of Middlesex, a flat of sodden green, looking at home when wrapped in a November mist, through which loom snug farmhouses, but it is else so unpopulated that only one road runs across it, by Yeading to Ruislip and Ickenham. Bold explorers, perhaps, might here find a touch of adventure in trespassing against notices which block approach to that devious brook, over a country of such agricultural note that it is not to be sneezed at unless by sufferers from hay fever. The Yeading Brook, further down promoted to the title of the Crane River, should have observance as the largest stream belonging entirely to Middlesex. It rises in two forks on the slopes about Harrow, and after flowing right across the county, has two mouths into the Thames, one of them with the by-name of the Isleworth River.

As the tram approaches Uxbridge, the scenery on the right improves in the swelling parks of Hillingdon, through which leafy lanes and paths wind over to Swakeleys and Ickenham. This, indeed, is one of the pleasantest square miles in Middlesex, filled up with the grounds and gardens of goodly mansions; and the golfers, upon whom one of its slopes seems wasted, have a better chance of attending to their game on less comely enclosures passed further back. Should any pedestrian doubt my word for it, let him turn up to the right opposite Hillingdon Church, by the “Vine,” following this by-way as far as the lodge gate of Hillingdon House on the left, just beyond which he may take a path through the park, to be brought back to the highroad as it enters Uxbridge, with little deviation

from his straight way. But, first, he would do well to stop at Hillingdon Church, a spaciously handsome one, containing brasses and monuments, conspicuous among them the Onslow and Paget tombs on either side of the altar. In the churchyard is the tomb of Rich, the celebrated harlequin and lessee of Covent Garden.

Hillingdon was the mother church of Uxbridge, whose long main street is sentinelled, a mile further on, by the tall modern spire of St. Andrew’s; then, further along, the older Parish Church stands hidden behind the Market Hall, so closely squeezed into the same block of building that there is no room for a chancel. This border borough, thriving on corn-mills and other industries, has more the look of an independent market town than any in Middlesex. Till lately a certain awkwardness of communications kept Uxbridge rather out of the way, served only by a branch from the Great Western Railway at West Drayton, as it once was by slow canal-boats; but now it has a Metropolitan line from Harrow, besides the electric tram that runs through it to the top of the descent by which the road falls to cross the Colne. The meaning of the name has been matter of controversy, but probably this bridge was christened from the Celtic word for water that appears in _usk_, _esk_, _axe_, _uisk_, _whiskey_, and other forms.

Uxbridge has a population of some 9,000, its thickly inhabited outskirts left out of account. The chief event in its history is the meeting here in 1645 of Commissioners appointed by Charles I. and the Parliament to negotiate terms of peace. The mansion in which their fruitless deliberations were held has been much altered, and is now an inn, but it still proudly exhibits itself as the “Treaty House” by the road at the west end of the town, and part of the interior is preserved in its old dignity. The sign of this inn was an inheritance from the “Crown,” at which the King’s Commissioners lodged, those of the Parliament finding quarters at the “George,” further back in the chief street. Beyond the “Treaty House,” first crossing the canal by a very Piscatorish-looking tavern and a large mill, we pass the Colne into Buckinghamshire.

The finest scenery about Uxbridge comes over the river in the county on which we must here turn our backs. Good Pisgah views of it can be had from the high ground of Uxbridge Common to the north of the town, by which goes out an airy road towards Rickmansworth, with branches for the quiet villages we visited from Pinner. Southwards the road by the river and the canal is not so pleasant, populated by various industries about Cowley, in whose churchyard was buried Dr. Dodd, the divine hanged for forgery, 1777. But opener and more agreeable country is reached at West Drayton, where, having passed its scattered hamlets on the canal, we find houses not so thick as good old trees about its green, and picturesque nooks by the branching swirls of the Colne. From the Church, enclosed in a park to the left, a fine avenue leads southwards, ending in paths and lanes that, by the villages of Harmondsworth or Harlington, make pleasant ways into the central western highway.

This, once renowned as the Bath Road, begins for Londoners with Piccadilly, leading by the south side of the Park to Kensington, Hammersmith, then by Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Gunnersbury to the busy end of Kew Bridge, lately rebuilt. Beyond, it enters the main street of Brentford, so narrow that one calls out at finding this thoroughfare choked with a tram-line, as it once was with flying Roundheads in a hot fight of the Civil War.

Brentford is styled the county town of Middlesex, but has little honour in its own country; and if its two fabulous kings were content to sit here on one throne, the County Council prefers a more dignified seat at Westminster. Like Washington or Ottawa, indeed, it seems to be an artificial capital, originally having no rank but as dependency of the adjoining parishes of Ealing and Hanwell. This dirty place, besides bearing an old bad name for bear-baitings, election riots, and the like disorders, has been a butt for metropolitan poets ever since Falstaff was disguised and drubbed as the fat witch of Brentford. The author of the _Rehearsal_ made it the scene for his burlesque. Johnson satirically coupled its name with Glasgow, in which he showed his ignorance, as all travellers of that century insist on the neatness and prettiness of the Clyde city before its days of grimy wealth. Thomson, in his _Castle of Indolence_, takes this “town of mud” to be a fit stage for pig-driving, where motor-cars now “gruntle to each other’s moan”; Goldsmith unkindly suggests it as goal for a race between “a turnip-cart, a dust-cart, and a dung-cart”; and other contemporary bards affect the same nose-holding attitude towards poor Brentford, their complaints, as a certain guide-book dryly says, being in our day echoed by sanitary inspectors. Of late the squalid county seat shows grace to be somewhat ashamed of itself, and has a scheme in view for sweeping and garnishing. Let us hurry through its show of gas-works, chimney-stacks, dingy wharves and slums about the mouth of the Brent, only noticing that at the Church and the Town Hall, near the bridge, the place attains a certain point of quaint ugliness not without attraction, and that its squalid waterside features set in relief the blooming of Kew Gardens across the Thames. There are some pleasanter aspects to the right, where, by Old Brentford and Boston House, the town begins to merge with the spreading outskirts of Ealing; but as to New Brentford, as it once was, its motto should be _Guarda e passa_.

When the road has crossed the Brent it passes, on the left side, the noble demesne of Syon House, which the tram-traveller might flit by unawares but for an ornate gate revealing the grounds. From a right-of-way crossing the park to Isleworth Church on the river bank, can be had a fuller view of the mansion, crowned by that lion so long familiar to Londoners over Northumberland House, there said, on some such authority as that local worthy, the late Mr. Joe Miller’s,

to wag its tail whenever it heard noon struck at Westminster. This stately structure, rebuilt by the Adams, had been a rich nunnery “conveyed” to the Lord Protector Somerset, and is now a seat of the Dukes of Northumberland. The community of nuns long held out at Lisbon, keeping the keys of their English home; but when, a century ago, they showed them to the Duke of that day, he is understood to have bluntly remarked that the locks had been altered. Another treasure of these nuns has been brought back to their native country--the famous Syon Cope, an elaborate specimen of mediæval embroidery now preserved at South Kensington Museum.

On the other side of the road one may turn up to the Earl of Jersey’s Osterley Park, first enclosed by Sir Thomas Gresham of City renown, the house rebuilt for Childs the bankers. The park extends over a well timbered and watered flat which Horace Walpole called the ugliest in the world; but that in our day seems a slander. By a road through it, or round its precinct, one can reach the villages of Norwood Green and Heston, where Middlesex does not want its common beauty of groves and gardens. This would be a cyclist’s or pedestrian’s pleasantest way on to beyond Hounslow, for the highroad, skirting Isleworth, has not much to say for itself.

Nor is there much to be said for Hounslow when we get there--a long, unlovely town, its brightest spots of colour the uniforms of soldiers quartered at its barracks or in a camp beside the Crane. Hounslow Heath has been used for many camps, and it had once an ill name as headquarters of knights of the road, whose prowess made the journey to Bath an adventure; but there is little trace of its wildness now. It seems to be all enclosed, except the plain to the left occupied by that permanent camp, with its fortification of barbed wire. This was the scene of an interesting experiment made in training a company of young soldiers, at the expense of the _Spectator_ and its readers. Besides the preparation of food for powder, another industry of the neighbourhood is the powder-mills to be found along the course of the Crane, locally known as the Powder Mill River; but they are naturally of a retiring disposition.

In the long street of Hounslow the road forks at a spot once grimly marked by the gibbets of highwaymen. The right branch is the Bath Road, soon passing an inn which proclaims itself the half-way house between London and Windsor, and in two miles crossing the Crane to Cranford. This is not the Cranford of Mrs. Gaskell’s delightful story, but a very pleasant village in its way, perhaps the prettiest place on the road, which had Thomas Fuller for rector--that learned, loyal, and humorous divine who, as the inscription on his tomb recorded in his own vein of wit, sought after immortality while immortalizing the worthies of England. The Church, with its monuments, is enclosed in the park of Cranford House, where once stood a Templar preceptory that became a seat of the Berkeleys, whose old nobility flared into a Georgian scandal now growing dim. Thus the autobiographical sportsman, Granville Berkeley, came to be partly brought up here, and has many tales to tell of highwaymen adventures, including that legend of a Bishop who took to the road and was “taken ill” on Hounslow Heath, being fatally shot through the body. This master of hounds could remember the county as dotted with heaths--Harlington Common, Hillingdon Heath, and others--which at one time stretched almost continuously down to the Thames, and across it seemed to piece together the evil repute of Hounslow and Bagshot. But he lived to lament how “corn-fields have sprung up in lieu of furze-bushes; villas have filled the swampy gravel-pits where, as a boy, I have shot snipes; and blooming gardens have banished the bullrushes”; nor will the _Spectator’s_ young warriors now make havoc among the plovers’ eggs, which used to be noted spoil on Hounslow Heath.

Another notability of the neighbourhood was Lord Bolingbroke, Pope’s “noble St. John,” of whose seat, Dawley Court, the name at least is preserved near Harlington Church. A little off the high-road, to the right, are the villages of Harlington, and Harmondsworth or Harmsworth, both with interesting old churches, and the latter boasting the largest church-barn in England. Between them lie the woods of Sipson. On the other side, opposite the by-road from Harlington, could once be traced the outlines of a Roman camp, one of the many connected with Cæsar’s name. Then at Longford is reached the Colne, hereabout, on the flat edge of Middlesex, splitting itself into tame branches, harnessed to industry. Two of these are artificial, one known as the Duke of Northumberland’s River, the other as the Queen’s, the Cardinal’s, or sometimes as the Longford River, formed by Wolsey to supply the waters of Hampton Court. Down the stream keeping the main name, one can find lanes and footpaths by Stanwell, Runnymede rifle-range, and Staines Moor to the Thames at Staines; and in favour of this walk it may at least be said that it implies no hill-climbing. On the Slough road we must hold on as far as Colnbrook to get out of Middlesex.

The straight road to Staines is of course by the great south-western highway that forked to the left in Hounslow, keeping parallel to the South-Western Railway, through a country much given up once to commons, now to market gardens, which have the name of nursing a not idyllic class of labourers. The chief places on the railway are Feltham and Ashford, between which appears to astonished passengers the rigging of a ship on dry land, planted here to instruct the boys of a large industrial school; and other institutions help to swell the population of this vicinity. On the road the most notable spot is Bedfont, its ancient Church enshrining curious frescoes apparently of Stephen’s reign, the churchyard famed for two yews trimmed into the likeness of peacocks, in which a wholesome legend, as interpreted by Tom Hood, sees two sisters thus transformed as punishment for their vanity.

And where two haughty maidens used to be
In pride of place, where plumy death had trod,
Trailing their gorgeous velvets wantonly,
Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod,
There, gentle stranger, thou mayst only see
Two sombre peacocks.

Another interesting church, with an elaborate Knyvett monument, is in the pretty village of Stanwell close by, where the spire stands not quite straight, about a mile to the right of the highroad. Bedfont is understood to have been the old limit of Windsor Park; and the neighbourhood has still some fine trees, as well as market-gardens; but the straight road’s best prospect shows ahead in the Cooper’s Hill ridge on the edge of Surrey, which it enters by the bridge at Staines.

This border town of three counties may be more pleasantly reached by the Thames, to whose devious curves the road makes a chord often travelled by Cobbett on the way to his beloved Surrey and Hampshire; then its scenery might shape his slander of Middlesex as “all ugly,” while his detestation of commons provoked him to call Hounslow Heath “a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in look,” yet “only a little worse than the general run.” It would be the shrinking heaths rather than the spreading fields that moved him to such sweeping condemnation; and if his burly ghost still jogs along the Staines road, it might want nothing but a few acres of “Cobbett’s corn” to take this part of Middlesex for an earthy paradise.

VIII

THE THAMES BANK

We come now to the south-western corner of Middlesex, presenting a thick fringe of beauty and interest along the crooked course of the Thames. The beauty, indeed, is mainly artificial, the ground being in general flat, traversed by sluggish streams, and often apt to revert to the condition of a flooded marsh till banked in by dykes of habitation and ornamentation that make most of this river-edge one line of garden suburb. When we abuse London for defiling the country, let us not forget how plain-featured country may be disguised and pranked out under the fancy-dress of parks, gardens, pleasure-grounds and playgrounds, to be reckoned among the manufactures of a great city. Here, indeed, a champaign face of nature smiles rather for Pope and Bolingbroke than for Wordsworth and Tennyson.

We have already touched the Thames at Brentford, and since inner London ended with Hammersmith, something might have been said of the green tongue of Chiswick and the quaint village of Strand-on-the-Green, below Kew Bridge, only in part overlaid by an extension of suburban Gunnersbury. Then above Syon Park and Isleworth Church, at one mouth of the Crane, the villas of St. Margaret’s make a transpontine dependency of Richmond, almost joined also to the spread of Twickenham. At this latter town I take up my tale of the riverside.

Twickenham has been growing so fast along its tram-lines that it seems in danger of becoming a commonplace extension of London; but it cannot forget days of dignity when Queens, Princes, and poets were at home here. Katherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr, and Katherine of Braganza are supposed to have occupied the manor-house that once stood beside the Church, where lie buried Pope, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Kitty Clive the actress, and Admiral Byron, that “Foul-weather Jack” whose story of the _Wager’s_ wreck gave so many hints to his grandson’s verse. Queen Anne, whose death is such a well-authenticated fact in history, was born at Twickenham, as was her sister Queen Mary. The only one of Anne’s seventeen children that struggled on to any prospect of surviving her, the poor little Duke of Gloucester, was brought from Kensington to Twickenham, as to the seaside, for change of air after an illness. In the next century, Horace Walpole speaks of the place as the “Baiae of Great Britain,” and quotes someone as declaring that “we have more coaches here than in half France.” Among Pope’s noble neighbours was the traveller of epistolary renown, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose friendship with the poet went so sour in the end. Some of the fine cedars hereabouts are said to have been raised from cones sent by her from the East. Another householder of rank was that Lord Ferrers, hanged for murder, according to the legend, in a silk rope, driven to the gallows in his own coach and six, which nowadays would probably have taken the road to Broadmoor Asylum. Writers whose works are now in every gentleman’s library, but not in Mudie’s, such as Richard Owen Cambridge, who seemed to his contemporaries a universal genius, and that other poet whose fortune was to be “born a Whitehead and baptized a Paul,” could once be counted among the notabilities of a place which, under the shadow of Pope’s renown, has housed more enduring names, from Fielding to Dickens. But for the long list of its celebrities and associations, the reader must be referred to such local chronicles as R. S. Cobbett’s _Memorials of Twickenham_.

Some of the houses thus celebrated still stand, or their names at least are preserved. Twickenham Park, at the Richmond Bridge end, a seat of Lord Bacon, has given place to humbler homes. But Marble Hill, built for the Countess of Suffolk, George II.‘s mistress, and at one time the home of Mrs. Fitzherbert, another George’s left-handed wife, has been saved from the jerry-builder to become a public pleasure-ground, that will not debase the view from Richmond Hill. This house is haunted by the shades of Pope, Swift, and Gay, as its neighbour by more

recent memories of princely exiles. Orleans House was so renamed as making an asylum for Louis Philippe, escaped from the storm of the Revolution which Madame de Genlis had taught him to hail with youthful enthusiasm. Half a century later, after his second banishment, this mansion again gave refuge to the Orleans family; then for a time it was turned into a club. Members of the same family have more than once occupied the adjacent York House, whose earliest dignity was as home of Lord Clarendon, by him given to his son-in-law, James II.; and so it came to be the birthplace of two English Queens. It has now been bought from the Duke of Orleans by a Parsee gentleman, son of the late Mr. Tata of Bombay, that millionaire of princely public spirit who lies buried in the next county.

This connection with our Eastern Empire is not altogether a new one for York House. A visitor here in his day was the Brahmin reformer Rammohun Roy, founder of the Brahmo-Somaj church, who is said to have designed writing a philosophical dialogue with the scene laid on the terrace of York House. For a good many years towards the end of the century it was occupied by Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, ex-Governor of Madras, as will be remembered by all readers of the later extracts from his Diaries, published in more than a dozen volumes. These volumes, abridged as they are, have been criticized as too voluminous; but they make excellent reading for judicious skippers, and after a century or two, one can imagine a further abridgment being treasured like Evelyn’s Diary or Horace Walpole’s Letters. This diarist was a keen amateur of good company and of good stories, which stud his pages like plums in a pudding of political suet and botanical crumbs. His anecdotes were collected from all quarters, even from the steps of the throne. There is one, for instance, of a South African millionaire, whose accent led to him being addressed in German by a very eminent personage: “_Sind Sie Baier?_” “Not at present prices, your Majesty!” stammered the confused courtier. In the same volume we are told how a whist player held thirteen trumps, yet did not win a trick, for it was in the far West, and his partner shot him dead as remonstrance against the trumping of his own ace.

But one must not deck one’s pages with plumes borrowed from a writer whom I met as fellow-member of two among his many clubs. I can recall a wet afternoon we killed together shortly before his death, when, to cheer what seemed a fit of depression, I told him all the stories I could think of as likely to stir his sense of humour. Only afterwards did it occur to me, in a flash of _esprit d’escalier_, that I had been drawing on one of his own lately published volumes; and I shall never know, on this side of Jordan, whether it were out of courtesy or obliviousness that the old gentleman let himself appear to be amused. With one maiden anecdote, however, now for the first time blushing in print, I had been able to tickle him exceedingly, as it dealt with a colonial governor, a kind of personage bulking as largely in his interest as a schoolmaster did for Parson Adams. In the suite of such a temporary potentate served an officer, whose wife told me how at home, years later, making a third-class railway journey, they had brought considerations to bear upon the guard that they should have the compartment to themselves. But at one station he came to explain: “Very sorry--train crowded--must put someone in with you--but I have picked out a respectable couple--quite decent people; you won’t mind them”--with which apology were bundled in the very decent couple my friends had last seen viceregally enthroned in a distant clime. So much for the transitoriness of official glory!

A tale which Grant-Duff might not have thought worth recording has been told of Mr. Labouchere, but an older date is ascribed to it: that an Englishman travelling in Germany, called upon to declare his _Stand_, could describe himself by no other title than “Elector of Middlesex,” then was astonished to be received with honours due to a prince. Mr. Labouchere comes to mind here as for a time occupying Pope’s Villa, of which the name survives, but little else, among the riverside mansions at the further end of Twickenham. It stands above Eel-pie Island, a leafy atoll of the Thames, that makes a screen or barrier-reef for this town, and has at its lower end a ferry not unknown to song.

Pope’s nearest neighbour here was Lord Radnor, whose grounds are now turned to public enjoyment. A little further on stands back from the river the park of Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole’s “piecrust battlements” succeeded Pope’s Villa as lion of the place. The once famous collection of curiosities, after being dispersed, was in part regathered into the present mansion, enlarged and improved from that “Strawberry Hill Gothic” structure that became a proverb, not to say a by-word, with more tasteful architects. The nucleus of it was “a little plaything house,” which its dilettante owner, on removing there from his “tub at Windsor,” described as “the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges.... Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah’s when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind.... Lord John Sackville pre-deceased me here, and instituted certain games called _cricketalia_, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.” Still, of a summer evening, such mysteries are celebrated on the lordly expanse of Twickenham Green; but if this self-satisfied letter-writer’s ghost could come skimming under what were once his own windows, Father Noah might find it no harder to be at home in a toyshop ark than Walpole to recognize the “romance in lath and plaster” that was his much-advertised work of half a century.

Behind Twickenham, amid more rural surroundings, stands, in a transformed state, the mansion of Sir Godfrey

Kneller the painter, which came to be a training-school for teachers, with the late Archbishop Temple for one of its principals, but is now the home of another muse as an academy for army bandsmen, whose performances are open to the public once a week. Kneller Hall was originally Whitton House, and not far off, on the south edge of Hounslow, survives the name of Whitton Park, where bagpipes should once have been practised; for, in the early part of the eighteenth century, it was a seat of the Duke of Argyll who in its grounds did so much towards introducing alien trees, to become naturalized citizens of our groves and gardens. This was the Duke who served with distinction under Marlborough and as victor over the Old Pretender’s forces in 1715; while he may be best remembered as patron of “Jeanie Deans.”

In the famous view beheld by that heroine from Richmond Hill, Twickenham is seen imperceptibly merging into Teddington, a parish of less fame, but it, too, has had notable inhabitants, from William Penn the Quaker to Peg Woffington the actress; and R. D. Blackmore, the novelist of our own time, practised the moral of Candide in a market-garden here. Both Upper and Lower Teddington are well populated now, the latter best known to Londoners for the first full lock on Thames tide-water, the former as an approach to Bushey Park. This is a royal demesne of over 1,000 acres, public access to which was secured by a local Hampden, Timothy Bennett, shoemaker, who in the eighteenth century fought the question of right of way at his own expense, then, in 1900, was rewarded by a curious memorial set up at one of the entrances to the park. The last royal personage who lived here was William IV., as Duke of Clarence; and one of the last acts of Queen Victoria was granting Bushey House to be a National Physical Laboratory. The park is now practically a public one, where a Sunday in May draws throngs of Londoners to admire the flowering of the chestnuts on its renowned avenue. But “when the high midsummer pomps are on,” too, and in the glories of autumn decay, and, indeed, at all seasons, Bushey, with its fine timber, its stretches of bracken, its ponds, and its herds of tame deer, makes a sight that no visitor to London should miss. The main avenue, a straight and broad mile, leads from Teddington to Hampton Court, on the other side approached from Kingston Bridge through the glades of Hampton Park, to which one could come round by the river and the villas of Hampton Wick.

The history of this palace is, of course, familiar to every British schoolboy; but in case any of my readers should be more at home in Versailles or the Vatican, I will treat them as M. Jourdain desired of his master. Hampton Court was built by Cardinal Wolsey at the height of his power and pride, that would have cast into shade the magnificence of Canons Park, the household of the butcher’s son being nearly ten times as numerous as that of Queen Anne’s Paymaster-General. Extensive as his building was, Wolsey appears not to have completed its full design when his power became endangered by the conflagration lit at Anne Boleyn’s eyes. He hoped to avert Henry’s wrath by presenting that too ambitious home to the King, who, in Diomedean exchange, gave him the manor of Richmond, where soon there were harder dealings between _Ego_ and _Rex meus_. Henry pulled about the Cardinal’s architecture in his own high-handed style, building the present hall and chapel; and he made Hampton a hunting-palace, with several parishes around as preserves. Edward VI. was born and partly brought up here. Here, too, Mary spent her dark honeymoon--that unloved sovereign whose faults have been excused by a schoolgirl on the plea of a temper soured under too many stepmothers. Hampton was a favourite residence with Elizabeth also, and with James, who held at it his famous conference of divines, from which came our present translation of the Bible. Charles I. was much at home at Hampton, and so in turn was Cromwell--a fact which may have caused the mental confusion of that schoolboy quotation of him as exclaiming, “Had I but served my God as I have served my King!” Charles II. and his brother are found now and then at Hampton, to which William took a special fancy, so that he had it restored and enlarged by Wren, to be a home reminding him of Holland by its canals and gardens; and he met his fatal fall from horseback in the park. Queen Anne’s sickly son, above mentioned, was born at the palace, where the poet remarks how--

“Thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.”

The Georges seem rather to have neglected Hampton Court, which in the last century or so occasionally housed royal guests, but has become mainly a sort of aristocratic almshouse, the apartments being granted to widows of distinguished public servants or ladies better born than endowed. The inmates of these dignified quarters are liable to be disturbed by the clatter of the adjacent barracks, by an uncertain ghost of one or other of Henry’s wives, that does not fail to haunt here, and most of all, perhaps, by the sightseers, who on holidays throng the quiet courts, the galleries with their thousand pictures, the hall with its tapestries, the gardens with their gigantic vine, the Long Walk by the river, the banks of the Long Water in Hampton Park, and the Maze near the Lion Gate, outside of which the palace is separated from Bushey Park by a fair-ground of refreshment houses.

The station for Hampton Court is at Molesey, on the Surrey side of the river, here making a string of shady islets and creeks well known to boating parties. The tramways from London come to Hampton Green, such a spacious and well-shaded area as beseems its royal neighbourhood. Along this, or through the south-west corner of Bushey Park, one can pass on to the village of Hampton, which touches the river at its rebuilt Church; but the banks are much blocked by private residences, and soon disfigured by huge water reservoirs. The most famous house here is Garrick’s villa, that seems to have been designed as an understudy of Pope’s. Besides this noble retreat, Garrick had a