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The High Street, Hampstead, is a continuation of Rosslyn Street, as Rosslyn Street is of the Hampstead Road. In my earliest days the way to Church Row and the church—which, being the oldest part of the town, deserves the earliest notice—was through some narrow passages to the left of High Street, called Church Lane and Perrin’s Court, disagreeable purlieus now happily altered.

Church Row was then the private and superior part of the old town of Hampstead, which, lying under the shadow of the church, still preserves an air of old-fashioned gentility and retirement.

The houses of red brick, with a string-course of the same material along their fronts, with narrow windows, dormers in the roofs, and fan-lighted hall doors, exhibit a style of domestic architecture common from James II.’s time to that of the Georges.

They remind one of the houses in Bush Lane, City, rebuilt after the Great Fire. We gather the meaning of the word ‘row’ from the fact that the houses on the north side of the way are much older than those on the left; these date no further back than the rebuilding of the church in 1745.

The door and gateway of No. 8, on the right, are clearly of an early date, as is also the weather-boarded, bow-fronted house on the same side of the way, and the double-gabled house nearest the church.

Several of these houses had originally very fine gardens, with stables and coach-house in the rear, and were occupied by rich City men, Riga, Turkey, and Spanish merchants, some of whose names may still be found under the moss of the churchyard stones and in the obituary columns of the magazines of the day. Others of these houses were of less pretension, as we find from Mr. Abraham’s ‘Book of Assessments,’ some being rated at £50 and £60 per annum, and others at £14, £15, and even less.

Church Row, Hampstead.

But Church Row has had residents memorable for attributes more enduring and higher than riches, and for their sakes as long as Hampstead exists, and living minds delight in recalling the scenes and associations connected with men and women of genius, the place hallowed as the sometime home of Mrs. Barbauld and her niece, Lucy Aikin, will always be for English-speaking people endowed with a personal interest.

From 1785 to 1802, Mrs. Barbauld, whose writings achieved a wide and distinguished popularity in the literature of the last century, resided here in the house (in my time No. 8) on the right-hand side of the way going from the town towards the church, noticeable for a large wrought-iron gate.

Her husband, Rochmount Barbauld, a native of Germany, was the pastor of a small congregation of Dissenters, whose place of meeting for worship was the Presbyterian chapel on Red Lion Hill, now Rosslyn Hill.

They were not rich, and from the time of their marriage, in 1774, had assisted their income by receiving a few pupils, a course they continued on coming to Hampstead, Mrs. Barbauld herself receiving a class of little boys. It appears to have been quite an aristocratic school, and the education and training of the children a labour of love to both the pastor and his wife.

She, in her early home, had enjoyed those advantages that have so often helped to strengthen and enlarge learned and literary tastes in women, an almost masculine education, and the society of highly-cultured and liberal-minded men. She was the only daughter of Dr. Aikin, who himself, we are told, was a man of sound scholarship, and the friend of Drs. Priestley, Enfield, and Doddridge, the latter of whom for some time resided in the family.[61]

Back View of Houses, Church Row.

Her first poems were published the year before her marriage, and were followed by her ‘Hymns in Prose,’ for children, hymns that were themselves full of poetry—at least, to the perception of one child’s heart—and were accepted by hundreds of parents with gratitude and admiration. Other works followed, and she assisted her brother, Dr. John Aikin, in the delightful series of stories entitled ‘Evenings at Home.’ But the fruits of her training and associations are best seen in her critical and graver writings, which display ‘a strong, logical, and correctly-thinking mind’[62]—nay, in some of them a breadth and liberality of thought quite beyond the times in which she lived; and it required in that day some courage to publish them. Take, for instance, her ‘Observations on the Devotional Taste,’ on ‘Sects and Establishments,’ a page of which I append.[63]

At the present day some of her suggestions have become opinions, and are openly preached; but her anticipatory expression of them reads rather like inspiration than the simple sequence of logical reasoning. Moreover, she was living in times when for women to have opinions at all—or at least to print them—was regarded as unfeminine, and looked upon with disfavour. Mrs. Barbauld herself, in her ‘Life of Richardson,’ tells us how the accomplished and clever Mrs. Delany found fault with a conversation in ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’ in which the words ‘intellect’ and ‘ethics’ occur, as being too scholastic to be spoken by a woman; and Dr. Johnson ‘did not greatly approve of literature as a career for women,’ though he condoned it in the case of little Fanny Burney and Miss Mulso, afterwards well known as Mrs. Chapone, or, as she used to be styled in my young days, Madame Chapone, without a course of whose letters no young lady was supposed to have finished her education. But Johnson affected, in Mrs. Barbauld’s case, to underrate her talents. When, however, at the very height of her literary reputation, he heard of her devoting herself to the culture of the young minds entrusted to her own and her husband’s care, she had, we are told, ‘his highest praise.’ No one, according to Mrs. Piozzi, ‘was more struck with this voluntary descent from possible splendour to painful duty than the Doctor.’ But why ‘painful duty’? I imagine that to Mrs. Barbauld the divine gift of teaching, as she, and Pestalozzi, and Dr. Arnold, and a few others, have taught, was as spontaneous and irrepressible as her writing poetry. The first-fruits of her genius had been for children. The publication of her ‘Early Lessons’ was an era in their first steps to knowledge, and her contemporaries declared it unrivalled amongst books for children. She had taught when quite a girl in her father’s school, for the simple love of teaching, and thus I do not believe that the step she took was one regarded by her as a descent. She had made a name that was destined to live, and the estimation in which her writings were held lost nothing by her ceasing to write, though the reputation of them enhanced that of the Hampstead School. No doubt she regarded her acceptance of the position from quite another point of view than did the learned Doctor, who had essayed school-keeping as a means to an end, and failed, while the lady entered upon it con amore, and her method was altogether different from the scholastic system then in vogue. She was the friend, companion, and confidant of her pupils; she sympathized with all their small troubles, shared their joys, and catered for their amusement. Howitt, in his ‘Northern Heights of London,’ tells how a lady calling on her found Mrs. Barbauld in the midst of making paper plumes, ruffs, and collars, for the boys who were about to play in private theatricals.

No; I feel sure there was no feeling of descent in her change of occupation, no sense of ‘painful duty’ in the teaching that helped to mould the minds of boys like Thomas Denman, afterwards Lord Denman, Lord Chief Justice of England, and of William Gell, subsequently Sir William Gell, the antiquary and topographer of Greece and Pompeii, neither of whom in after-life forgot their indebtedness to her. She had, as a writer, known the triumph of success. Her poems, published in 1778, had passed through four editions in the year. She had won the praise of Charles James Fox, who particularly admired her songs; had been eulogized by Garrick as ‘She who sang the sweetest lay’; and was regarded by Wordsworth as the ‘first of literary women’; while Crabb Robinson, who did not see her till she had reached old age, was enthusiastic in his admiration of her intellect, and charmed with her appearance even then.

It is amusing, from a woman’s standpoint, to mark the generous praise and admiration of these men, and compare it with the stinted commendation and personality of the ‘sweet Queen’s’ ex-reader, and of Mrs. Chapone. Some time after Miss Burney’s return to her father’s house, Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld called upon her, whereupon she writes in her journal that the latter is altered at this period, ‘but not for the worse to me, since the first flight of her youth has taken with it a great portion of an almost set smile, which had an air of determined complacency and prepared acquiescence that seemed to result from a sweetness that never risked being off guard. I remember,’ she runs on, ‘Mrs. Chapone saying to me, “She is a very good young woman, as well as replete with talent, but why must one always smile so? It makes my jaws ache to look at her;”’ and then Miss Burney sums up her literary merit as ‘the authoress of the most useful works, next to Mrs. Trimmer, that have been written for children, though this with the world is probably her very secondary merit. Her many pretty poems, and particularly songs, being generally esteemed. But many more have written these as well. For children’s books she began the new walk, which has since been so well cultivated, to the great information as well as the utility of parents.’

She tells us that Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, Mr. Aikin, had a very fine countenance, and describes Mr. Barbauld as ‘a very characteristic figure, but well bred and sensible.’ Crabb Robinson is more clear in his delineation of him, and says he had ‘a slim figure, a weazen face, and a shrill voice. He talked a good deal, and was fond of dwelling on controversial points of religion. He was by no means destitute of ability.’ Amongst Mrs. Barbauld’s guests at Church Row in 1798 was Miss Mary Galton, afterwards Mrs. Schemelpennick, one of the shining lights in that brilliant company that met in Mrs. Montague’s drawing-rooms on the occasions of her literary assemblies, which brought together all the wit and talent of the town.

Amongst these celebrities Mrs. Barbauld was a welcome guest, and many of these gifted men and women visited her in Church Row.

She appears to have been as charming in person as she was rich in intellect. A small portrait of her in the European Magazine of March, 1786, suggests, from the sweetness of expression and refinement of the features, the composed beauty of countenance which Crabb Robinson describes her as possessing at sixty-two years of age.

In 1802 the Barbaulds removed from Hampstead. Through the kindness of a friend, I have before me the copy of a letter from Rochmount Barbauld to the celebrated Dr. Parr, dated March 29, 1802, in which he says: ‘We are on the point of leaving this charming spot, in order to remove to Stoke Newington, thus exchanging the beauties of nature for the pleasures of the heart and mind—for the advantage, I mean, of living close to Dr. Aikin.’ This closes all questions as to the time when the Barbaulds removed from Hampstead, which one writer has asserted to have been in 1799. It was at Stoke Newington that Crabb Robinson paid his first visit to them in 1805-6. We have seen his personal description of Mr. Barbauld, but he added to it the suggestive expression that at that time the afflictive disease was lurking in him which in a few years broke out, and, as is well known, caused a sad termination to his life. This was the circumstance that made their removal to Stoke Newington a necessity, in order that Mrs. Barbauld should be near her brother for advice, assistance, and protection. No wonder Mrs. Le Breton, in her recollections of her, calls her life a brave and beautiful one. Of Mrs. Barbauld, Crabb Robinson says: ‘She bore the remains of great personal beauty; she had a brilliant complexion, light hair, blue eyes, a small elegant figure, and her manners were agreeable, with something of the generation departed.’

Mrs. Barbauld.

When he next saw her she was quite aged, and her husband had been dead many years; but she still kept the calm sweetness of countenance that had charmed him on the occasion of his first visit. One of her poems, written in her declining days, is so characteristic of her quiet faith and the serenity of her mind that we cannot forbear quoting it:

‘Life, we’ve been long together,

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;

’Tis hard to part when friends are dear,

Perhaps ’twill cause a sigh, a tear;

Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not “Good-night!” but in some brighter clime

Bid me “Good-morning!”’

And it was in some such mood that death found her in the eighty-second year of her age.

On leaving Church Row, the school—probably on account of her husband’s malady—being given up, Mrs. Barbauld immediately recommenced her literary labours, and compiled a selection of essays from the Spectator, Tatler, and Guardian, with an introductory one of her own. This work appeared the year after her removal from Church Row, and was followed by her ‘Life of Richardson,’ whose correspondence she had edited. Her husband died in 1808, and the ‘widow recorded her feelings in a poetical dirge to his memory,’ a form of diverting feelings with which I have no sympathy, especially as the ebullition appears to have been published! I better understand her seeking relief in other literary occupation. She wrote a poem in 1811 in which she more naturally refers to her husband. She had also edited a collection of the British novelists, published in 1810, with an introductory essay of her own, and biographical and critical notices.

Placidity and cheerfulness continued with her to the last. She died of gradual decay on March 9, 1825. Meanwhile she had had the pleasure of witnessing the literary success of her brother’s daughter, Miss Lucy Aikin,[64] who had written various historical memoirs and a ‘Life of Joseph Addison,’ which Macaulay criticised, and who, because ‘Miss Lucy Aikin’s reputation—which she has so justly earned—stands so high,’ thinks it right to remind her of her lapses, and of ‘the necessity in a future edition for every fact and date, about which there can be the smallest doubt, to be verified.’ Valuable and wise advice, the rigour of which he softened by adding that ‘the immunities of sex were not the only immunities Miss Aikin might rightfully plead ... several of her works, and especially the very pleasing memoirs of the reign of James I., having fully entitled her to the privileges enjoyed by good writers.’ In June, 1822, this lady and her mother took the house in Church Row which the Barbaulds had occupied, and continued to reside there till 1830, when Mrs. Aikin died. Upon the loss of her mother, Miss Aikin removed to No. 18, on the opposite side of the way, where she remained till 1844, when she came to London.

Nearly twenty years later, when verging towards the end of her life, she returned to Hampstead, and died at the house of her relative by marriage, P. H. Le Breton, Esq., John Street, January 24, 1864, while these notes of Hampstead and its neighbourhood were being collected.

At No. 25, not far from the house Miss Aikin had last occupied in Church Row, and which did in my recollection—perhaps does so still—possess a lovely view from the back-windows, was the residence of two well-descended ladies, the Misses Gillies; the one almost as well known as a writer of charming stories for young people as her sister, Miss Margaret Gillies, was as an artist. Her pictures were in the fifties, and long after, familiar to the frequenters of the summer and winter exhibitions of the Old Society of Painters in Water-Colours, of which she had long been a member. In this house I am reminded that the last twenty-eight years of her long life had been passed. I remember her being there in 1859-60, and she may have lived there even at an earlier date. She died July 20, 1887, verging on eighty-four years of age. Previous to her tenancy Miss Meteyard had lived in this house on her first going to Hampstead. It was then a sort of private boarding-house especially affected by literary people, and indirectly brought her acquainted with two or three lady writers of a past period, of whose style, personal and literary, she had some very amusing recollections.

Subsequent to Miss Gillies’ death, I learn from Baines’ ‘Records of Hampstead’ that this house was tenanted for some time by the novelist, Wilkie Collins, son of the painter. The late well-known Mr. Ballantyne, the magistrate, also resided in Church Row; and for a considerable period it was the place of residence of Dr. Garth Wilkinson[65] and his wife. He was the author of a curious and eloquently-written book, which attracted some attention at the time of its appearance. Here also, at a far-off period, and only as a lodger, I believe, Park, the historian of Hampstead, is said to have lived.

In quite recent times Mr. Le Breton, who had married a grand-niece of Mrs. Barbauld’s, and to whom the inhabitants of Hampstead are indebted for the preservation of the Judges’ Walk, tenanted a house in Church Row, where he died.

In 1895 Miss Harraden, the writer of that well-read story, ‘Ships that Pass in the Night,’ had her summer residence in Church Row.

It will be pleasant for future chronologists of Hampstead to know that, amongst the many men of genius who have made it their home, Mr. Austin Dobson, best known by his charming Vers de Société, resided here. Beyond occasional verse, he is too little heard of. It is to be regretted, for his lyrics contain some real poetical gems.

In my time this central, yet retired, part of Hampstead, which is close to the busiest streets, and yet entirely secluded from them, continued to be a favourite locality with artists and other professional men. There were symptoms of social decadence towards the end of the fifties in a ‘Home for Servants,’ to which No. 28 was then converted; while two or three other public institutions thrust themselves noticeably forward, ‘as ’tis their nature to.’ Its old traditions of privacy and dignified quiet—there was no public traffic through Church Row; Miss Sullivan’s toll-gate stopped the way—was to be sacrificed, and the character it had maintained for so many years for staid gentility and retirement swept away.

Austin Dobson.

No. 9, next door to Mrs. Barbauld’s old home, had become, before I left the neighbourhood, a Reformatory School for Girls, established in 1861 by Miss Christian Nicoll, under whose admirable superintendence it has done, and is doing, good and useful work. The school is the only Government one of the kind in Middlesex. The young inmates have all been convicted of crime, and are undergoing various terms of detention; but advantage is taken of this period to bring them under the influence of religious teaching free from sectarianism, to instruct them in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and to train them for domestic service. Account has to be rendered to the Home Secretary of the conduct and progress of the girls for four years after they leave, and the result is that from 70 to 80 per cent. are found to do well.

From Church Row you walk straight into the gateway of the prettily-situated parish church of St. John, and in those times the well-kept graveyard.

Until 1745 the ancient chapel, originally dedicated to the Virgin, and appropriated in 1461[66] to the Abbot and Convent of Westminster, continued to be the only church at Hampstead. It had been patched up and added to and rendered picturesque by reason of age, irregularity of outline, and ruin, and was in so dangerous a condition, to quote the preamble of the petition to rebuild and enlarge, ‘that the inhabitants could not attend Divine worship without apparent hazard to their lives.’ Moreover, it is further stated ‘that Hampstead being a place of great resort, especially in summer-time, the said church, were it in a repairable condition, would not be sufficient to accommodate one-half of the parishioners and others who are desirous of coming to Divine service there.’

The old church was taken down in the spring of 1745, and the present structure consecrated by Dr. Gilbert, Bishop of Llandaff, October, 1747.[67]

During the two years it took in building, the Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk was rented at £50 per annum (which benefited the Wells Charity to that amount), and it was used as the parish church, although it had not been consecrated.

Meanwhile the monuments and mural tablets within the demolished Chapel of St. Mary were necessarily displaced, and have not, Mr. Howitt tells us, ‘found their way back to the depositors they marked, and the memory of which they were intended to perpetuate.’

The design of the church was furnished by a resident architect, Mr. Flitcroft,[68] ‘Burlington Harry,’ as he was familiarly called from circumstances elsewhere referred to; and the building entrusted to a resident builder, Mr. Saunderson, who was not, it appears, able to follow the original design of the church (the spire of which was very handsome) for want of funds. A note in the trust book, 1744, relating to the building of the church, throws a strong light on Mr. Saunderson’s dilemma, and the small importance of architectural beauty, or even propriety, in the minds of the trustees of that period.

‘The tower, being placed at the eastern end of the church, would be a considerable saving of expense.’ As a result of this saving, the church appears the wrong side before, with the tower and belfry at the east end, and the chancel at the west. You pass the altar on entering, and the font is at the further end. There is an altar-piece, but no east window, and the whole is further darkened by galleries north and south. Park says it is a neat but ill-designed church, and we can only repeat what Park says.

An engraving of the old church (said to be from an oil painting by Grisoni) in Park’s ‘History of Hampstead’ represents a picturesquely irregular rustic building, with low walls, rather high-pitched roofs, sharply-pointed gables, and a small open timber bell-tower. It has dormers in the roof, a square mullioned window in one gable, a different sized one in another, and other lights thrown in anywhere. A transverse addition forms the whole into an irregular cruciform structure.

Trees crowd around it at the west end, as they do at the present day, and in the graveyard are several recognisable monuments, notably that above the burial-place of the Delamere family; of Daniel Bedingfield, Clerk of the Parliament, 1637; of —— Popple, Esq., Secretary of the Board of Trade, 1722. A flat stone (recut since its discovery), beside the second pathway to the left on entering, bears the date of the Great Fire, 1666. There is also that of John Harrison, the inventor of the chronometer, who died March 24, 1776, after sixty years’ application to the improvement of watches and clocks, and of whom Mrs. Montague, writing to her brother, Mr. Robinson, from London, May 28, 1762, observes: ‘Mr. Harrison’s watch’ (the fourth, Dr. Doran says), ‘and most perfect timekeeper for ascertaining the longitude at sea’ (and for which he ultimately received £2,400), ‘has succeeded beyond expectation. Navigation will be improved by it, which all who have the spirit of travelling shall rejoice at.’[69]

The clean-swept paths, the flowery garden-graves, the close-mown turf, the shrubs and bowering trees, and the varied, often elegant tombs amongst them, give Hampstead churchyard an air of beautiful repose and quiet.[70] Two magnificent yew-trees with straight, tall, channelled trunks, centuries old, spread their wide horizontal branches over spaces ‘sacred to many sorrows.’ Beneath the first of them, to the east, is the grave of Sir James Macintosh, ‘a man,’ says Mr. Howitt, ‘of grave, practical, useful, and moderately reforming character and talents, rather than of that broad and original stamp which marks the foremost leaders of mankind.’

If we take the first path to the left hand on entering the graveyard, we pass on the side nearest the wall the tombstone of Henry Cort, ironmaster, who greatly improved the manufacture of British iron, and according to Mr. William Fairbairn, in his ‘History of Iron and its Manufacture,’ conferred on his country during the last three or four generations equivalent to six hundred millions sterling, and has given employment to six hundred thousand of the working population, but who himself was suffered to die of disappointment and broken fortune in the sixtieth year of his age. Passing on to the second cross on the right of this path, we find the headstone which marks the simple grave of Lucy Aikin, who lies at the feet of her friend and neighbour, Joanna Baillie, whose railed-in altar-tomb has still a little footpath worn by pilgrims’ feet on the grass beside it.

‘Oh, who shall lightly say that fame

Is nothing but an empty name?

When but for those, our gifted dead,

All ages past a blank would be,

Sunk in oblivion’s murky bed.’

It is only fitting that she, who sang thus in her ‘Metrical Legends of Exalted Character,’ should in her village grave illustrate the sentiment of these lines.

If we follow the east path to the end, and keep in the one under the south-east wall, the second tomb is that of John Constable, R.A. He rests beside his beloved partner, Maria Elizabeth Bicknell, and one or more of their children. He died in London, March 31, 1837.

A little further on, under the same sheltering wall, lies a flat stone inscribed, ‘Sacred to the Memory of Maria Honey, whose mortal remains repose in the vault beneath. She died in the year of our Lord 1843, in the 27th year of her age.’

Some of our readers remember the brilliant, graceful actress, and thus can feel the pathetic force of the brief lines inscribed beneath:

‘Shall I remain forgotten in the dust,

When Fate, relenting, lets the flowers revive?’[71]

Parish Church, Hampstead.

Within the church lies Incledon, the exquisite sweetness of whose voice, and wonderful power of expression, drew from the stately Sarah Siddons the graceful compliment that in singing two lines he could produce as much emotion as she could by the elaborate representation of the highest passion. (This delighted him and did not hurt herself.)

A white marble tablet at the west end of the church marks the resting-place of Dr. Askew, and at the east end of the south gallery we find the handsome mural monument to the memory of Lady Erskine, whose burial-place is in a vault at the west end of the church. Other memorials of persons of ‘mark and likelihood’ appear in the church and churchyard, but we have only pointed the way to a few of them.

Since the foregoing pages were written, a very interesting addition, which we owe to America, has been made to the local memorials in St. John’s Church, in the delicately sculptured but idealized bust of Keats, which we almost touch on entering. It presents itself in profile, bracketed in the vicinity of the Communion-table—a graceful offering to the genius of the poet, and recognition of the undying charm of his poetry, which is as deeply felt in the land of Longfellow as at home. We are certainly not an enthusiastic people, and seldom memorize our literary men or women—never in any public way till a century or so of years have given proof of the abidingness of their deserts. The time has therefore not yet arrived for a public acknowledgment of our national appreciation of the writer of ‘Endymion’ and ‘Hyperion’; but it will come, and I should not wonder if this charming reminder on the part of our Transatlantic kinsfolk should lead the sooner to the honour of a niche for him in Poets’ Corner.

In wandering through this, the only graveyard in Hampstead, one notices the absence of those doggerel lines and absurd inscriptions once so frequently seen in country churchyards, and which were wont to introduce a sense of the ridiculous into these solemn places. There is still remaining an inscription on a tombstone in the churchyard that for complacent egotism is ludicrously noticeable:

Here lie the Ashes of

MR. JOHN HINDLEY,

Of Stanhope Street, Mayfair, London;

Originally of King Street, Liverpool; who, under peculiar disadvantages,

Which to common minds would have been

A bar to any exertion,

Raised himself from all obscured situations

Of Birth and Fortune by his own Industry and frugality

To the enjoyment of a moderate competency.

He attained a peculiar excellence in penmanship and drawing

Without the Instruction of a Master,

And to eminence in Arithmetic, the useful and higher

Branches of the Mathematics,

By going to School only a year and eight months.

He died a Bachelor

On the 24th day of October, 1807,

In the 55th year of his age,

And without forgetting Relations, Friends, or acquaintances,

He bequeathed one-fifth of his Property

To Public Charities.

Reader, the world is open to thee.

Go thou and do likewise![72]

The author of ‘A Walking Tour in Normandy’ states that in the church of Avranches there is a marble slab erected by the Marquis de Belbœuf in 1844 to the memory of his predecessor of that name, the late Bishop of Avranches, who, it is stated, died, and was buried at Hampstead, in England. Is anything known of the Bishop or his grave?

On March 30, 1797, the remains of Lord Southampton were conveyed in great funeral pomp from his late residence in Stanhope Street for interment in the family vault at Hampstead.