The High Street, Hampstead, is a continuation of Rosslyn Street, as Rosslyn Street is of the Hampstead Road. In my earliest days the way to Church Row and the church—which, being the oldest part of the town, deserves the earliest notice—was through some narrow passages to the left of High Street, called Church Lane and Perrin’s Court, disagreeable purlieus now happily altered. Church Row was then the private and superior part of the old town of Hampstead, which, lying under the shadow of the church, still preserves an air of old-fashioned gentility and retirement. The houses of red brick, with a string-course of the same material along their fronts, with narrow windows, dormers in the roofs, and fan-lighted hall doors, exhibit a style of domestic architecture common from James II.’s time to that of the Georges. They remind one of the houses in Bush Lane, City, rebuilt after the Great Fire. We gather the meaning of the word ‘row’ from the fact that the houses on the north side of the way are much older than those on the left; these date no further back than the rebuilding of the church in 1745. The door and gateway of No. 8, on the right, are clearly of an early date, as is also the weather-boarded, bow-fronted house on the same side of the way, and the double-gabled house nearest the church. Several of these houses had originally very fine gardens, with stables and coach-house in the rear, and were occupied by rich City men, Riga, Turkey, and Spanish merchants, some of whose names may still be found under the moss of the churchyard stones and in the obituary columns of the magazines of the day. Others of these houses were of less pretension, as we find from Mr. Abraham’s ‘Book of Assessments,’ some being rated at £50 and £60 per annum, and others at £14, £15, and even less. [Illustration: _Church Row, Hampstead._] But Church Row has had residents memorable for attributes more enduring and higher than riches, and for their sakes as long as Hampstead exists, and living minds delight in recalling the scenes and associations connected with men and women of genius, the place hallowed as the sometime home of Mrs. Barbauld and her niece, Lucy Aikin, will always be for English-speaking people endowed with a personal interest. From 1785 to 1802, Mrs. Barbauld, whose writings achieved a wide and distinguished popularity in the literature of the last century, resided here in the house (in my time No. 8) on the right-hand side of the way going from the town towards the church, noticeable for a large wrought-iron gate. Her husband, Rochmount Barbauld, a native of Germany, was the pastor of a small congregation of Dissenters, whose place of meeting for worship was the Presbyterian chapel on Red Lion Hill, now Rosslyn Hill.