‘One evening in passing along the Finchley Road towards Child’s Hill, Mr. Landseer stayed at a gate of ancient look, and said to his friend, “These two fields were Edwin’s first studios. Many a time have I lifted him over this very stile. I then lived in Foley Street, and nearly all the way between Marylebone and Hampstead was open fields. It was a favourite walk with my boys, and one day when I had accompanied them, Edwin stopped by this stile to admire some sheep and cows which were quietly grazing. At his request I lifted him over, and finding a scrap of paper and a pencil in my pocket, I made him sketch a cow. He was very young indeed then, not more than six or seven years old. After this we came on several occasions, and as he grew older, this was one of his favourite spots for sketching. He would start off alone, or with John or Charles, and remain till I fetched him in the afternoon.... Sometimes he would sketch in one field, sometimes in the other ... but generally in the one beyond the old oak we see there, as it was more pleasant and sunny.”’[105] This was the upper field, nearest West End Lane, which some of my readers will remember. Nor will it lessen their interest in this once pleasant locality, that it was while walking in these fields that William Howitt, whose name is a household word in English family literature, told the story to Miss Meteyard, who was never wearied of expatiating on the woodland beauty of this neighbourhood. Within her own recollection it was famous for the number and beauty of its oak-trees—‘a region of them,’ she called it—and West End Lane was then a deep-hedged, tree-shaded alley all the way to Fortune Green. In the May of 1815 (it should be 1816) we find Haydon, the disappointed, sad-lived artist, ‘sauntering,’ as he tells us, ‘to West End Lane, and so to Hampstead, with great delight.’ And no wonder, for besides the spring-dressed beauty of Nature around him, he had for his companion that lover and evangelist of it, Wordsworth, and they were bound for the Vale of Health, and Leigh Hunt’s cottage, where Cumberland joined them, and afterwards walked with Haydon on the Heath. This excerpt from the artist’s diary closes the mouths of the sceptics who doubt that Wordsworth visited the ‘pink of Poets,’ as his critics sarcastically called the author of ‘Rimini,’ in his humble retreat at Hampstead. Park, to whom I am so much indebted, tells us that the demesne land, occupying from four to five hundred acres of the richest land in the parish, lay scattered along the western side of the hill from Child’s Hill, north, to Belsize, south, and that the name of manor was in his time appropriated to that portion of them situated south of West End Lane. He also says that the old manor-house, which some of the then living inhabitants of Hampstead remembered, was a low, ordinary building in the farmhouse style, but with a very capacious hall. [Illustration: _Vale of Health, Lower Heath, 1840._]