The Well Walk is clean swept out of many of its old properties, but the Tavern, the Episcopal Chapel, with a modern Pump House, and the Long Room on the other side of the way, still remain. In summer the Walk is seldom destitute of company; either the force of habit or the associations of the spot attract visitors to it. At this period patients, though few, were never wholly absent, and conversation and cards had still their headquarters in the Long Room; invalids naturally preferred the level walk and the benches in the Lime-tree Avenue, from which the unimpeded view eastward must have been very charming. [Illustration: _James Boswell._] It seems a long way back to the days when Addison, with that knot of literary men (‘who gave a more undying lustre to the reign of Queen Anne than even the brilliant victories of Marlborough’) met here; yet Pope, the last of them (save Swift), had been lavish in praise of Richardson’s “Pamela,” and knowing nothing personally of Johnson at the time, but the reputation of his scholarship, and of his poverty, upon the publication of the latter’s poem, “London,” used all he had of influence with Swift, and that of others with Lord Gower, to procure the writer of it an Irish degree, so that the title of Doctor might enable him to obtain a mastership of £60 per annum. The act was unsolicited, and should always be remembered to the credit of the bard of Twickenham. Pope had passed away, but Johnson had personally known him. Richardson, whom we last met in 1748, and who had fed ever since on the honey of feminine adulation, is still an occasional visitor to Hampstead, and finds his way to the Well Walk with his old friend Mrs. Donnellan, where Mrs. Delany and the Dean, who managed to spend a considerable portion of their time on this side of the Channel, might sometimes be met with, for they had personal connections and friends in Hampstead and the neighbourhood.[279] Dapper little Colley Cibber, ‘the greatest fop either on or off the stage’ that Lady Braidshaigh had ever seen—‘an irreclaimable old sinner’ she calls him—still visits his favourite suburb, and haunts the precincts of the altered Wells, hunting after new faces, and as happy if he can obtain the notice of a fine woman as he was at the age of seventy-seven, when Richardson found him dabbling with the Tunbridge Waters, and described his vanity in a letter to Miss Mulso. In the interim one of his odes has been set to music by Mr. Greene, and been sung in the clubs and coffee-houses. But some things have gone out of his life. Mr. Foote is too busy with his summer performances at the Hay market to be wiled from business by the ancient Laureate, and his old friend, the handsome, clever Barton Booth, has long since found a place amongst the celebrities in Poets’ Corner.