It is difficult, now that the whole country south of London has been covered with villas, roads, streets, and shops, to understand how wonderful for loveliness it was until the builder seized upon it. When the ground rose out of the great Lambeth and Bermondsey Marsh--the cliff or incline is marked still by the names of Battersea Rise, Clapham Rise, and Brixton Rise--it opened out into one wild heath after another--Clapham, Wandsworth, Putney, Wimbledon, Barnes, Tooting, Streatham, Richmond, Thornton, and so south as far as Banstead Downs. The country was not flat: it rose at Wimbledon to a high plateau; it rose at Norwood to a chain of hills; between the Heaths stretched gardens and orchards; between the orchards were pasture lands; on the hill sides were hanging woods; villages were scattered about, each with its venerable church and its peaceful churchyard; along the high roads to Dover, Southampton, and Portsmouth bumped and rolled, all day and all night, the stage coaches and the waggons; the wayside inns were crowded with those who halted to drink, those who halted to dine, and those who halted to sleep: if the village lay off the main road it was as quiet and as secure as the town of Laish. All this beauty is gone; we have destroyed it: all this beauty has gone for ever; it cannot be replaced. And on the south there was so much more beauty than on the north. On the latter side of London there are the heights with Hampstead, Highgate, and Hornsey--one row of villages; but there is little more. The country between Hatfield or St. Albans and Hampstead is singularly dull and uninteresting: it is not until one reaches Hertford or Rickmansworth that the explorer comes once more into lovely country. But the loveliness of South London lay almost at the very doors of London: one could walk into it; the heaths were within an easy walk, and the loveliness of Surrey lay upon all. I have mentioned already some of the heaths, those which remain at the present moment. It will be a matter of surprise to the reader to hear of the many waste and wild places which have been appropriated and built over in the last two hundred years. In the parish of Lambeth alone, an extensive tract, it is true, there was nearly 500 acres of commons: namely, Kennington, Norwood, Norwood Common (in another part of Norwood), Hall Lane, Knight's Hill Green, Half Moon Green, Rush Common, South Stockwell Common, South Lambeth and North Stockwell Common. With the exception of the first all these are now gone. [Illustration: ALLEYN'S ALMSHOUSES, 1840]