Samuel Stanton, vintner, was the proprietor of the Upper Flask, or Upper Bowling-green House, as it was called in 1707. He left it to his nephew and namesake, a man of considerable wealth and standing, it would appear, whose sister was married to the Earl of Warwick, and who bequeathed this house in 1750 to his niece, Lady Charlotte Rich, their daughter. In all probability it continued to be let as an inn for a considerable time after this date. A writer in the _Universal Museum_, 1764, says that, going to Hampstead to observe an eclipse of the sun, he noticed near the Upper Flask a stone fixed, stating that this spot was as high as the cupola of St. Paul’s. The stone has long since disappeared, but this note proves the existence of the tavern till within five years of the date when it came to be the property of George Steevens, the indefatigable annotator of Shakespeare, twenty of whose plays he published from the original text, and with the aid of Johnson brought out a complete edition of them in 1773. The fourth edition of his plays of Shakespeare, with notes, was undertaken and finished wholly by himself in the short space of eighteen months. To facilitate the printing of it, and prevent any delay for want of copy, proofs, etc., he was in the habit of starting with the patrol from Hampstead every morning between four and five o’clock, without reference to season or weather, taking with him the copy written overnight.[124] ‘Him still from Hampstead journeying with his book Aurora oft for Cephalus mistook, What time he brushed the dew with hasty pace, To meet the printer’s dev’let face to face.’[125] In his time the house was simply paled in, and had a fair lawn before it, surrounded by picturesque trees and shrubs. A man of fine taste, but of a violent and uncertain disposition, George Steevens lived in retirement at Hampstead for nearly thirty years (twenty-one of them in this house), ‘excluding all local acquaintance.’ He is said to have expended £2,000 in improving and beautifying the house and grounds. He died here in 1800, aged sixty-two, and was buried in the chapel at Poplar, in which parish he was born, being the son of a sea-captain in the service of the East India Company, subsequently a director. A monument by Flaxman and an epitaph by Hayley distinguish his tomb.[126] In 1812, when John Carey published the fifth edition of his ‘New Itinerary, or Book of the Roads,’ this house was in the possession of Thomas Sheppard, Esq., M.P. for Frome,[127] who retained it till 1845, when it passed into other hands. At this present writing it is the property of Mrs. Lister. Immediately opposite is the green mound and ornamental shrubbery of the New Reservoir, and at the end of the wall, continued from the house, and enclosing the once busy stable-yard and offices of the Upper Flask, a path runs into the Holford Road, by Heathfield House, and so to the East Heath.