But there were times when these ‘pretty fellows’ aspired to quite another rôle, that of hackney-coach and curricle driving, the latter vehicle being of such a height and build as to render the exercise really dangerous. Yet to drive furiously was a _sine quâ non_; and as the public parks scarcely admitted of such performances, the race-course at Hampstead was a favourite rendezvous for these “young bloods,” and the Chicken House, and other summer lodgings, were for some seasons much patronized by Templars, and other youths in the ranks of the Toupees. To old ladies they seem to have been a terror in more ways than one, and they do not always appear to have put off the characteristics of the hackney coachman with his three-caped coat. When Swift, remembering the clever horsewoman Lady Betty Germain had been when Lady Betty Berkeley, recommended her for her health’s sake to ride when in London, among other reasons which she gave him for not doing so was this: that ‘nothing would more rejoice the Toupees than to see a horse throw an ancient gentlewoman.’ Miss Burney a few years later introduces us, in ‘Evelina,’ to some of these eighteenth-century Jehus. Meanwhile, one after the other of the frequenters of the Hampstead walks we have recalled is missed from them. First the soft-hearted old seaman, Captain Coram, passes away; then Colley Cibber vanishes; and Richardson dies (1761), and is followed a year later by his venerable friend, Mrs. Donnellan. More than a dozen years after Richardson’s death, I find in the delightfully-named ‘Flowers of Parnassus,’ in the _Monthly Miscellany_ for 1774, ‘Lines addressed to a Lady weeping over “Clarissa.”’ From the period of what is called the Augustan Age of English literature, Hampstead had claims to be considered, if not the literary suburb which it subsequently became, at least an appanage of the Muses. If their most famous representatives did not absolutely reside here, they were, at all events, frequent visitors, so much so that the Muses themselves were poetically fabled to have forsaken ‘Aganippe’s font, And hoof-ploughed Hippocrene,’ for ‘Hampstead courted by the western winds,’ as Dr. Armstrong in his poem to ‘Health’ sings of the upland suburb, where he and his brother resided for some time, being very well regarded by the inhabitants. Could the doctor have been that other ‘tame genius’ that Horace Walpole bracketed with Akenside?