We find it marked in the map of Middlesex in Gibson’s edition of Camden’s ‘Britannia’ (1695) as Wildwood Corner. It had been so called in Elizabeth’s time, and the tradition survives in the names of certain messuages, as Wildwood, Wildwood House, Wildwood Lodge, etc. [Illustration: _Bull and Bush, Hampstead._] In all probability, the weather-boarded cottages opposite Wildwood Lodge, and the cosy little inn, the Bull and Bush, are about the oldest habitations in North End. The latter flourished when Addison wrote, and it is said that it shared his favour, and that of his friends, in common with the Upper Flask. In its yew-tree arbour he may have enjoyed himself after the simple fashion of Sir Roger de Coverley, and drunk ripe ale, and smoked his churchwarden on summer afternoons. It has its arbour and garden still—a carefully-kept one—which makes a pretty feature of the unpretentious but comfortable house. In later times, Gainsborough, Garrick and Foote, Sir Joshua Reynolds (at rare seasons), Cibber, Booth, Hogarth, and Laurence Sterne are said to have been amongst its summer visitors. The room—an upper one—in which their feasts, to which the company brought ‘attic salt,’ were held looks out upon a smooth-clipped lawn with flowery borders, and commands the little eminence overlooking Wildwood, where Blake would first appear to the vigilant eyes of the eldest Linnell’s little daughter on Saturday afternoons, who sat watching for the anticipated appearance of her favourite. Upon the green lawn is the yew-bush or bower to which the inn owes half its name, a whimsey to which rustic landlords in the eighteenth century appear to have been much addicted. Being furnished with a table and seats, it afforded a quiet retirement or smoking-box.[175] Hither, in the Addison days, came the companionable Dr. George Sewell, with some or other of his many friends, friends who, at his death in 1726, neglected even the common duties of humanity, and permitted this accomplished gentleman and scholar to pass unhonoured to an almost pauper grave, unfollowed but by one attendant, and with the mean obsequies of one ‘whom nobody owns.’ He was a bachelor, and kept no house, but boarded at Hampstead, and we are told ‘he was so much esteemed, and so frequently invited to the tables of the neighbouring gentry, that he had seldom occasion to dine at home.’ He contributed many papers to the supplemental volumes of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, wrote the tragedy of ‘Sir Walter Raleigh,’ and other works, and various poems. His writings impress one with the feeling that he was not only a clever and versatile writer, but a good and amiable man. No memorial was raised above his grave, but a boundary-tree—a holly—in the hedge of the churchyard for some time marked the place of his interment. This has long since been removed.