Wandering on, I was fortunate enough to recognise the high-hedged orchard-garden that had belonged to Vale Lodge, and I had no farther difficulty in finding my way to the whereabouts of Leigh Hunt’s cottage. Now, instead of the open space before it and its fellows, the approach is strangely narrowed and closed in, but on the top of the garden-gate of the _last of the row_ of what were four white weather-boarded cottages in my time (of which only two remain, the place of the others being filled by two tall, narrow brick houses), the Town Council, or Board of Works, or some other local authority, had had inserted a brass plate, some two inches wide and five or six in length, inscribed ‘Hunt’s Cottage.’ After this, let no American or other traveller say that we do not commensurately keep alive the memory of our men of genius! For one mistaken moment I felt grateful; the next I had realized that this was not the cottage I had been assured on such excellent authority was the one lived in by Leigh Hunt, though next door to it. But what does it signify? Fame is far-reaching, and the space covered by the row so small that the memory of the one little home includes the whole, and clothes these few cottages on the south-west side of the Vale of Health with undying interest. Then I remembered how Leigh Hunt had written: ‘Strada Smollett is delightful. By-and-by there will be such streets all over the world. People will know not only the name of a street, but the reason for it.’ Soon I found myself wondering if such an important body as the Town Council or the Board of Works could really be answerable for the sparse bit of brass, and the obscure ‘Hunt’s Cottage’ graven on it, which might mean any man’s cottage of the name of Hunt. There are quite a number in the London Directory, whereas there is only one _Leigh Hunt_, the author of ‘Rimini’ and ‘The Old Court Suburb,’ etc. Why, if intended to honour the poet, had they deprived him of the Christian name that distinguished him, and has a place in every reader’s memory? I will not despair of seeing this rectified and expanded, so that all who pass by may see the ‘writing on the wall,’ and know that for some few years of his long life the ‘Pink of Poets,’ as his adverse critics sarcastically called him, resided in one of these cottages, where he wrote the greater part of, and finished, the story of ‘Rimini.’ In 1812, Leigh Hunt, writing from 37, Portland Street, Oxford Road, to Mr. Henry Brougham, tells him that he ‘longs to get into his Hampstead retreat, out of the stir and smoke of London.’ And a little later he informs the same correspondent that he is about to move to a cottage at West End, Hampstead, ‘a really _bonâ-fide_ cottage, with humble ceilings and unsophisticated staircase; but there is green about it, and a garden with laurels.’