What an occasion would this incident have afforded for the fiery declamation and denunciation of the great Nonconformist preacher, George Whitfield, who three years afterwards writes in his Diary that he took his station under a tree near the horse-course at Hampstead! He was preaching there by invitation, and his audience, he tells us, were ‘some of the politer sort,’ which gave him occasion to speak to their souls of our spiritual race, and he adds, ‘most were attentive, but others mocked.’ Johnson somewhat cynically said of him that ‘he had known Whitfield at college before he became better than other people’; but he also said that ‘he believed he sincerely meant well, but had a mixture of politics and ostentation, while Wesley thought only of religion.’ The races had grown to be so great a nuisance, from the crowds they drew together and the mischief that ensued, that some time subsequent to 1748 they were put down by the Court of Magistrates.[33] Except at election times, there had never been such throngs of people or disorder on the Heath. The effect of the races had been to drive away the more refined portion of visitors to Hampstead, just at a time of year when the season was at its high-tide, and the Heath and woods and walks in their perfection. In the spring of 1750 the people of Hampstead witnessed another instance of the spontaneity of panic-fear, which sent numbers of people to the Heath and the high grounds of the other northern suburbs to escape suffering the fate of the Metropolis, which a mad trooper (‘next to the Bishop of London’[34]) had predicted should be swallowed up by an earthquake in the April of this year. The shock of one had been felt on February 8, and again on March 8, and the proverbial fatality of the third time led to the belief that a final one would take place on April 8. When the three months were nearly accomplished, at the end of which the prophetic trooper had announced the destruction of London, this ‘frantic terror,’ writes Horace Walpole, on April 2, ‘prevails so much that within these three days seven hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner.’ Several women, he adds, ‘made themselves earthquake gowns to sit out of doors all night.’ The day passed, however, without disturbance, and, except that the unfortunate seer was sent to Bedlam, nothing came of the prediction. That must have been a grand day on the Heath, mid-winter as it was, when, roused by Bonaparte’s threatened invasion of England (1803-4), the Hampstead Association—disbanded about a year before—joined themselves into a volunteer force, 700 strong, with the public-spirited ex-Lord Mayor of London, Josiah Boydell, as their Colonel Commandant, and Charles Holford, Esq., for their Major, and took the oath of allegiance in the face of heaven and their friends and neighbours on their own beloved Heath. They then marched to the parish church of St. John’s, where Lady Alvanley presented them with their colours.