Coming down the years, we find that literary people, either as residents or visitors, more and more affected Hampstead and the Heath. No matter of surprise to us who have tasted the exhilaration of its fresh breeziness and summer beauty, and witnessed the cold splendour of its wintry landscapes, with a sky such as Danby delighted to paint reddening the west, and making wider the fields of snow stretching around; the still woods wrapped in rime, each tree crystallized, as it were; the tall groups of elm, ash, and pine trees with each reticulated branch and spray standing out with photographic accuracy against the clear atmosphere, whose sharpness stings the pedestrian and warms. It was under such conditions that Lovell Edgeworth saw the Heath when he visited his philosophical but eccentric friend Day, the author of ‘Sandford and Merton,’ who had ‘lodged his newly-married wife in “inconvenient lodgings” at Hampstead.’ Edgeworth found him walking on the Heath with her, though the snow covered the ground. But then the lady was sensibly attired in a frieze cloak and thick shoes. She surprised the visitor, who had been led to imagine her an exceedingly delicate person, by an appearance of rude health. But this is beside North End. About the year 1748 Dr. Akenside, divided between the love of poetry and duty to his profession, endeavoured, with the assistance of his friend the Hon. Jeremiah Dyson, who had purchased a house for him in this neighbourhood, to establish himself as a physician at Hampstead. We have somewhere read that the house which Akenside occupied was really at Golder’s Hill.[176] The two statements are not irreconcilable, as in the directory of this year Golder’s Hill is included in North End. Horace Walpole, writing in 1750, says of him: ‘Here is another of those tame geniuses, a Mr. Akenside, who writes odes. In one he has lately published he says, “Light the tapers ... urge the fire!” Had not you rather make gods jostle in the dark than light the candles, for fear they should break their heads?’ But in criticising the poet’s ‘Pleasures of Imagination,’ he allows that at its first appearance it attracted much notice, from the elegance of its language and the warm colouring of the descriptions. Akenside appears to have been a proud, cold, uncomfortable man, with an overweening opinion of his abilities, a dictatorial habit, a morbid sensitiveness on the score of his connections, and a susceptibility of offence, which seldom left him long without one. He seems to have passed a rather disagreeable time at Hampstead.