To the west (a proper pendant to the view of Highgate) our vision closes with the spire of St. John’s Church, and the town of Hampstead stretching down a peninsula of houses in a sea of verdure, terminating in the fast-narrowing strip of green fields between Kentish Town and the St. John’s Wood estate on this side of Hampstead Road. I specially remember a bit of landscape in which the red viaduct[3] in Sir Maryon Wilson’s demesne shows to much advantage on the grassy foreground between the wooded undulations of the park. It is still pretty, but ‘with a difference.’ Then a footway crossing the Heath led through an old gray, weather-beaten gate to a shady path, with a plantation of young trees on one side, and a hedgerow, redolent in summer of wild-rose and May, dividing it from a meadow on the other. The remains of a long-disused tile-kiln stood on the edge of the field, the red earth of which showed its fitness for such manufacture. This path led through upland fields to Highgate, and was a charming one, beloved by painter and poet. The last time I saw it the beauty was devastated, and the meadow changed into a brickfield, with a view to its conversion into a site for building on. But I am forgetting, in my remembrances of the charming suburb, that from the earliest birth of a taste for natural beauty, Hampstead must have had a special interest for the inhabitants of London. Beautiful as were the whole range of gently-swelling hills forming the background of the City, and long subsequent to Tudor times covered with dense woods, which encroached on the north and east even to its gates, and came down on the west as far as Tyburn, Hampstead Hill from its altitude, and the fact, as someone has written, that it ‘closed the gates of view in that direction,’ must have had an interest beyond the others. Baines claims for Hampstead that it was a village before 1086; in other words, that the five manses, or homes of the villani and bordarii on the original clearing, which are mentioned as existing when Domesday Book was compiled, constituted a village. In 1410, at the time of the assignment of Hampstead, together with Hendon, to Henry Lord Scrope of Marsham for the maintenance of his servants and horses, he being then attending Parliament on the King’s service, it is included with Hendon, and styled a town (‘the towns of Hampstead and Hendon’). [Illustration: _Viaduct._] But in the reign of Henry VIII. it is again called a village, by which designation it continued to be called even in our own times, long after it had outgrown the dimensions of one, just as a beloved child when grown up retains the pet name given to it in infancy; and truly Hampstead continues to be the best-beloved of all the City suburbs.