Few country ladies, unless privileged persons who desired to keep up their relations with the Court, came to London in those days, except on urgent occasion. The great trouble and expense the journey involved, the execrable condition of the roads, and terror of the highwaymen who infested them, were reasons quite sufficient to account for the home-staying, which has often been put to their account as a virtue, and flaunted in the face of their travel-loving great-great-great-grand-daughters. The principal event in the lives of many country ladies was the summer visit to one of the fashionable spas—Bath or Harrogate, Tunbridge or Hampstead Wells—where they met old friends and renewed acquaintances, picked up the threads of unfinished family histories, saw dress ‘as worn in the politest circles,’ compared notes with one another, and acquired the newest information of the world that lay outside their own, so that on their home-going they became exemplars and oracles on all social and society matters to those of their acquaintance who had not had the felicity of visiting the spa. But to return to Hampstead. The light-hearted indifference to what was going on around them enabled the fashionable visitors to endure the scandal of the runaway marriages at Sion Chapel, the hurly-burly of the four days’ fair, and the company brought together by these doings; but at last the cheating play at the raffling-shops, and the morals of Hampstead, became so notorious ‘that persons of character were almost ashamed to be seen there, even with their own relations,’ and the most reckless of the rank and file of fashion found it necessary to turn their backs upon it. Yet, before it reached this last depth of moral degradation, Hampstead Wells must have exhibited a brilliant epitome of Bath and Tunbridge. Of course, the behaviour of the company at the Assembly and Long Room was not lost sight of by the wits and satirists of the day. The ballad-singers preserved the follies of the Wells in wicked verse; the playwrights—at least one of them, as we have seen—dramatized them; and I should not wonder if Baker’s holding of the ‘mirror up to Nature,’ or the modish pretence of Nature that so often passes for it, had something to do with the waking up of thoughtful people, and the falling-off of fashion from the place. A few people of the upper class, who had learned to love sweet Hampstead for its own sake, continued, from season to season, to return here for change of air, so that the better kind of lodging-houses in Pond Street and elsewhere were not wholly deserted. Neither were the Wells, of which we have a rather deterrent proof in the following advertisement from the _Daily Courant_ of June 18, 1718: