Oh, those old taverns!—those trysting-places of successive generations of wits and men of genius! May your walls, coeval with the Kit-Cats, keep their memories green for generations yet to come, and with them those of the men of genius of our day, whose names are ‘household words’ in the land of their birth, and in every other English-speaking country also. To-day, as in the older days we have attempted to recall, artists and literary men and women still feel the attractions of the pleasant suburb, and increase them by the magnetism of their own; for delightful as the natural beauties of Hampstead are, how much less would they loom without the charm of these associations that meet us everywhere, and people the Well Walk, and the Hill, and Heath with memories of the deathless men and women who have trodden them! Nor do we forget that a share of this interest is due to our American kinsfolk, who have freely sent us their stars, whilst reserving their stripes for our enemies; for them, as for us, the facts that Washington Irving, Longfellow, Hawthorne of the ‘Scarlet Letter,’ the fated Margaret Fuller, Mrs. Stowe, Wendell Holmes, and many others of their gifted nation, have made pilgrimages to the gleby Heath, and looked with loving eyes on scenes made sacred by the transition of immortals through them, whose works live on through the dead centuries, and whose names have passed into glories, are so many added charms to the intrinsic ones of our Sweet Hampstead. CHAPTER XIX. _A RETROSPECT._ As I approach the end of my pleasant task, the contrast between the ‘Sweet Hampstead’ of Constable’s (and even of my own) time with the present, makes itself felt with a sense of loss and change that is almost pathetic, so many of its lovely accessories are now missing. It is like contrasting the simplicity and grace of childhood with the conventional man or woman it has subsequently developed. Instead of rejoicing in its enlargement, and the importance of the townlike outgrowths on its skirts, at the increase of its wealth, and the growing numbers of its population, I like to think of it as it was in those far-away days, when the walk to it through Gospel Oak Fields was such an easy one to me, and the toil of the ascent of what is now the East End Road repaid itself in refreshing draughts of the ‘impalpable thin air’ one breathed upon its summit. Then Hampstead was a street of village shops upon the slope of the hill, with a broken sky-line of red-roofed, one-storied, brown-brick or weather-boarded houses, with small windows, often glazed with glass that darkened light. Some of the shops had still hanging shutters, and open shop-boards, and many of them half-hatch doors, a few of which, with a fine vein of what was called independence, were comfortably bolted against all comers during meal-times. Not many years ago I met with the same custom in practice at Totnes, on the river Dart.