Lord Thurlow, who seems to have ostentatiously set social laws at defiance, in spite of fashion, was wont to appear amongst the visitors ‘wearing his full suit of cloth of the old mode, great cuffs, massy buttons, great wig, long ruffles,’ his black eyebrows exceeding in size any Lord Campbell had ever seen, and ‘his voice, though not without melody, was like the rumbling of murmuring thunder.’[283] Fanny Burney says of his voice: ‘Though low, it was very melodious.’ I do not know if when at Hampstead he permitted the companionship of the tame white goose by which he was generally attended in his London home, and which followed him about his grounds, and is said to have been never absent from his consultations. If so, the presence of his feathered pet must have considerably added to the grotesqueness of his own; for a gentleman’s dress of the period, as established ‘in the polite circles of St. James’s and at Bath,’ consisted of a light-coloured French frock, with gilt wire or gold buttons, breeches of the same colour, and tamboured waistcoats for afternoon dress. His lordship’s wide-skirted coat, like the rest of his habiliments, must have been a score of years behind the mode. Strong passions and a hard, vindictive, unforgiving nature lowered in the large dusky eyes and thick, almost meeting eyebrows of his lordship. His treatment of the daughter who had offended him by marrying the man she loved, but who nursed her father with the greatest tenderness in his last illness, fully bears out the character that his countenance indicated. With the commencement of the present century, new names appear in connection with Hampstead and its celebrities. Joanna Baillie, the shy girl of Mrs. Barbauld’s acquaintance, upon the publication of her tragedy of ‘De Montfort,’ was at once accepted as a genius and poetess. A few years later Sir Walter Scott visited Sweet Hampstead to do her honour, and heralded the poet of Rydal Mount,[284] some years in advance of his appearance there in person. Later on in the present century we find Lord Byron, for his health’s sake, I presume, spending some weeks of summer in one of the toy cottages in the Vale of Health, two doors distant from that subsequently tenanted by Leigh Hunt. It was on a window-pane of this humble habitation, and not, as has been stated, in Leigh Hunt’s cottage, which he never visited, that he wrote with a diamond (a favourite amusement of the time when diamonds were less common than in these days) two lines which are said to have afterwards appeared in ‘Childe Harold.’