So, though the village on the west side of the Common had some good houses on it, Richardson’s inclination for a Tusculum at Finchley was probably not very strong, or his friend’s badinage, from the proportion of truth it contained, proved convincing, for we find him settling down in the placid respectability of Parson’s Green, and the enjoyment of that delightful summer-house at the end of the garden, with room enough in it for the literary young ladies who buzzed about him like bees about a bed of borage, with their mild suggestions and criticism, all commendatory, and praises altogether saccharine, till we believe in the truth of Johnson’s remarks to Mrs. Thrale, afterwards Madame Piozzi: ‘You think I like flattery, and so I do, but a little too much disgusts me. That fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.’ An anecdote which Finchley is not concerned in, though apropos to our talk of Richardson. [Illustration: _Madame Piozzi._] If we take the Finchley Road back, we can make our way by Cricklewood to Child’s Hill Lane, and so back to the West Heath. There were in 1859 two or three good houses to the left of the road, with large, newly-enclosed grounds, but a few years later this portion of the Finchley Road was the least interesting and the most vitiated place on the skirts of Hampstead. The melancholy attempt to raise good houses on either side appeared to have been blighted by the unwholesome airs arising from the ill-drained and already-crowded suburb of Child’s Hill lying in the bottom to the right. Here various businesses the reverse of sanitary were carried on, the vile smells from which in hot weather, even at a considerable distance, made the inhaling of them dangerous, and occasioned a sort of local fever, from which it was said the neighbourhood was seldom free. It was a relief, when leaving the sight of coal-yards covering what had been delightful meadows only a few years ago, and the useful, but certainly unpicturesque, railway-station to the right, to turn the corner by a semi-rural hostel at Cricklewood, and a row of village shops, and, mounting the slope, to enter what was quite recently a deep-hedged country lane, into which, according to the exploded theory of my antiquarian friend, the old Roman road over Hampstead Heath struck down by way of Cricklewood to Hendon. We pass the Hermitage, the temporary summer home of many well-known artists, and two or three cottages. The road, in places still fringed with trees, suggesting the shady way it must have been in olden time, ends at the spot that Platt’s Lane brought us to, within a short distance of West Heath.