the names of the most distinguished painters of England, was inaugurated at the end of the eighteenth century by the arrival there of George Romney, who took a house on the hill long supposed to have been that now known as the Mount, in Heath Street, though the recent discovery of a deed of tenancy seems to prove it to have been Prospect House on Cloth Hill, now the Constitutional Club. However that may be, the artist soon found his new quarters too small, and built on to them a large studio for the painting of historic pictures, which Flaxman, who visited him in it, called a fantastic structure, and in which, later, when it had become the Holly Bush Assembly Rooms, Constable gave lectures on landscape painting to the members of the Literary and Scientific Society of Hampstead. Romney did little or no work in Hampstead, for his health was already undermined when he embarked on his new enterprise, and his sojourn left no permanent impress on the neighbourhood, when he fled to Kendal to die in the arms of his long-neglected wife.

Far otherwise was it with Constable, who has done more than any one man to interpret for future generations what Hampstead was in the first half of the nineteenth century, for the Heath and the grand views from its summit inspired some of his finest landscapes, and many of his most charming drawings give details of its scenery. Even before his marriage in 1816 Constable used constantly to go up to Hampstead from his London lodgings to paint, and in 1821 he took a small cottage, No. 2 Lower Terrace, still very much what it was then, for his wife and their three little children. There they lived until 1826, when they removed to the present No. 25 Downshire Hill, but in 1827 Constable gave up his London studio, and settled down permanently with his family in Well Walk, at which house is uncertain, some saying it was No. 40, others No. 46. There his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached, died, and her loss made him cling to Hampstead more closely than ever. She was buried in the churchyard of St. John, where later her husband was laid to rest beside her.

CONSTABLE'S FIRS, HAMPSTEAD HEATH

Though the fame of no one of them is quite equal to that of Constable, many other resident artists have aided in maintaining the æsthetic traditions of Hampstead. Some of the best works of William Collins were produced in a house on the Green, and his friend Edward Irving often visited him there. Sir Thomas Beechey retired to Hampstead after his long career of activity; Edward Duncan, Edward Dighton, and Thomas Davis, all resided for some time and died there. Paul Falconer Poole was looked upon as a Hampstead artist par excellence, for he worked in the neighbourhood for some twenty-five years. William Clarkson Stanfield was devoted to the old town, and lived in what is now the Public Library, in Prince Arthur Road, from 1847 to 1865, when he removed to Belsize Park Gardens, then St. Margaret's Road, dying in his new home in 1869. Alfred Stevens, who lived for some time in Hampstead, and died there in 1875, executed the beautiful monument to the Duke of Wellington for St. Paul's, in the temporary church of St. Stephen's, which he rented for the purpose. The sculptor John Foley passed away at the Priory, Upper Terrace, in 1874, and in 1888 Frank Holl died in the house he had built for himself in Fitz-John's Avenue. The last twenty years of the long life of Miss Margaret Gillies, one of the first Englishwomen to adopt art as a profession, were spent at No. 25 Church Row, and Mrs. Mary Harrison, one of the first members of what is now the Old Water-Colour Society, resided for sixteen years and died at Chestnut Lodge. Even more intimately associated with Hampstead than any of these was George du Maurier, for he turned its scenery and the familiar incidents of its Heath to account in many of his clever drawings for Punch. 'It was,' says his friend Canon Ainger, writing in the Hampstead Annual for 1897, 'by the Whitestone Pond that the endless round of galloping donkeys suggested to him the famous caricature of the "Ponds Asinorum," and it was near a familiar row of cottages at North End that he saw the little creature of eight years old who told her drunken father "to 'it mother again if he dared."'

CHURCH ROW, HAMPSTEAD

Du Maurier brought home his bride in 1862 to a house in Church Row, and it was there, and in New Grove House on the Upper Heath, to which he removed later, that his best work was done. He lived at Hampstead through the exciting time of the boom in his famous novel Trilby, which is said to have hastened his end, and on his death in 1896 he was buried in the churchyard of St. John.

The Parish Church of Hampstead replaces, as already stated, a much earlier chapel that was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was completed in 1745, and successfully enlarged in 1747 under the auspices of the beloved Canon Ainger, who was vicar from 1876 to 1895. It is a typical example of the style of the period of its foundation, and the ivy-clad tower that rises from the eastern end composes well with its surroundings, the eighteenth-century houses of Church Row forming a kind of avenue leading up to the main entrance.

The next oldest church in Hampstead is the Roman Catholic chapel of St. Mary in Holly Place, built in 1816, whose first minister was the French Abbé Morel, who was banished from France during the Revolution, and was visited in his retreat by many famous exiles, including the Duchesse d'Angoulême. He became so attached to his English home that he refused to return to his native land when he was recalled, and he died at Hampstead in 1852, leaving behind him a great reputation for sanctity. The year of his death was completed the Protestant church of Christ Church—the lofty spire of which is a notable landmark—associated with the memory of the Rev. Dr. Bickersteth, who, after ministering in it for thirty years, became Bishop of Exeter; and later were erected the churches of St. Saviour and St. Stephen's, that have been supplemented by many other places of worship of different denominations, so that the parish presents indeed a remarkable contrast to the time when the little sanctuary on the hill met the needs of the whole district.

To a certain Mrs. Lessingham belongs the unenviable distinction of having been the first to alienate public land on the Heath by enclosing, in 1775, the grounds of what is still known as Heath House. Her right to do so was contested, but at the trial which ensued she came off victorious, and an example was set which has been all too often followed. The jury actually decided that the land in dispute was of no value, and the vital question at issue, of the power of the lord of the manor to grant permissions for enclosure, was left undecided. Not until 1870 were any really efficient steps taken to preserve for the people the use of the beautiful Heath, but at that date the nucleus of the present extensive estate was secured in perpetuity. Two hundred acres of land were then bought by the Metropolitan Board of Works, and to them were later added the 265 acres of Parliament Hill, the name of which is said by some to commemorate the fact that the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot watched from it for the blowing up of the Houses