As a citizen of London Joshua Boydell had received the highest honours, having filled the office of High Sheriff, and subsequently that of Lord Mayor. While resident at Hampstead he had taken a leading part in all that concerned the well-being of the inhabitants, and had given the prestige of his name and the encouragement of his comradeship when eighty-four years of age to the Hampstead Volunteers, of which corps he was Colonel Commandant. He died on November 12, 1804.[83] At the date of Abrahams’ pamphlet (1811) there were seventy-two houses within the boundaries of Frognal, a hamlet of handsome residences, surrounded by wooded groves and beautiful gardens of an extent begrudged by builders in these modern days. One of these, remarkable for its quaint comeliness, is Fenton House (early Georgian), situated at the very top of the grove, an old red-brick mansion, with a high-pitched, red-tiled roof, and key-patterned timber cornice, painted white, running round it. The front, which recedes a little in the centre, is ornamented with a pediment of the same pattern, and the projecting ends have balustrades simulating galleries upon them. A remarkable house, though, according to modern notions, an inconvenient one. [Illustration: _Fenton House._] In or about 1793 Fenton House was the residence of Philip Robertson Fenton, Esq., formerly an eminent Riga merchant, the son of Thomas Fenton and Elizabeth his wife, of Hunslet, near Leeds. She was the daughter of Sir Charles Hogton, of Hogton Tower, in Lancashire, where the slab above his grave tells us her son ‘was born on the night of the 19th of November, 1731, O.S.,’ she being on a visit to her brother. Mr. Philip Fenton resided at Hampstead for fifteen years, and died there in the seventy-second year of his age. Park, though a contemporary during the latter years of his life, gives us no personal particulars of this gentleman, but we find in the list of subscribers to the ‘History of Hampstead’ the name of C. R. Fenton, Esq., of the India House; and in 1829, at a meeting of copyholders held at the Holly Bush in the July of that year, to take measures to preserve the Heath from further encroachments, a Mr. Fenton presided. It is therefore probable that some of the family continued to reside at Hampstead. No doubt Fenton House[84] had had some other name previous to the retired Riga merchant’s occupation of it. Some time in the summer of 1746 Johnson (he was not yet Doctor) had lodgings in Frognal. Park,[85] and subsequently Brewer, who copied him, assure us that the house ‘so dignified’ was the last in Frognal southward—then, in 1813-15, in the occupancy of Benjᵉ Charles Stephenson, Esq., F.S.A., ‘where _the greater part, if not the whole_, of the “Vanity of Human Wishes,” in imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal, was written.’[86]