‘HAMPSTEAD.—Whereas it has been reported that a robbery has been committed this season upon the road to Hampstead Mineral Well, this is to inform ladies and gentlemen that for the future at half-past ten in the evening, every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday (being public days), there will be a sufficient guard, _well armed_, sent by the inhabitants of the said Wells, to attend the company thence to London.’[241] Evidently the citizens and their wives, and others of the inhabitants of London, did not forsake the allurements of the Long Room and the Walks. Neither did the City seamstresses in their vamped-up fine clothes, nor the City fop, ‘Who put on belt and sword at Temple Bar.’ The early termination to the evening’s entertainment, in contrast with the all-night dancing Arabella had enjoyed at the Wells, is noticeable in the above advertisement, but is by no means attributable to the improved morals of the place. It appears to have sunk year by year. The cheating at the gambling-tables led to fighting and riots. Footpads lurked in the fields and hedges, and highwaymen infested the roads, making them more than ordinarily perilous for foot-passengers, and adding greatly to the duties of the magistrates at Hicks’s Hall (the annals of which would, I imagine, throw considerable light upon the story of the Hampstead Wells at this intermediate period). Ten years after the decline of their fashion, many of the buildings in the Well Walk disappeared, but the tavern, then known as the Whitestone Inn,[242] the Assembly-room and pump-room (under the same roof), and the Long Room, with the tea and coffee rooms adjoining it, remained. Dr. Gibbons still lived, and still retained his faith, as did Dr. Arbuthnot also, in the valuable curative quality of the water, and the invigorating air of Hampstead, which, when occasion required, he not only recommended to his friends, but sought himself. In this way it is that we find Gay here in the summer of 1722, whose friends had ‘brought him,’ as he says, ‘to Hampstead at a time when his life was despaired of,’ after the failure of the South Sea Scheme, in which his slender fortune was invested. Here, in Well Walk, we can imagine him seated, with Pope and Arbuthnot by him, owing his recovery almost as much to the tenderness of the author as to the skill of the doctor.