Still stranger is the chronology of the writer in the _Bookman_ (1895), who gives the year of their mother’s death (1806) as the date of the Baillies’ removal to Hampstead. CHAPTER IX. _NORTH END._ When Leigh Hunt wrote of Hampstead that it ‘was a village revelling in varieties,’ he summarised in a sentence its chief characteristic and charm. Behind the High Street, to the right, there lies a labyrinth of lanes, passages, courts, roads, groves, and squares. The map of the place shows its complications, and the irresponsibility of the builders. Houses seem to have been run up without design or order; a so-called road ends in a cul-de-sac, a square is represented by a malformed triangle, the groves are without trees. Good old houses assert themselves on high places, and mean ones crowd the ways leading up to them. All shows the extemporary mode of building locally prevalent at the time, in which no fixed plan appears; it is the old copyhold mode of temporary convenience consolidated into brick. But variety meets you everywhere. Nature herself aids it in the formation of the ground—the mounts and interposing undulations. Trees are seen here and there, and bits of primitive waste appear in quite unexpected places. Queer old houses nestle in trellis-work and creepers, interned within high garden walls, and a little compact settlement of them tops the Mount, the altitude of which shows that of the highway to the Heath when Oliver Goldsmith, his heart still true to the memory of ‘Sweet Lissoy,’ climbed it on summer Sunday mornings, and wrote afterwards of the view from Hampstead Hill that ‘Nature never exhibited a more beautiful prospect.’ This was in 1756-57, and the road was not cut through till 1763; so that from its summit, as was said by some old author of Highgate Hill, one trod upon the top of St. Paul’s. And it may be that the solitudes of the upper Heath, with its hawthorn-thickets, its broken ground and gravelly hollows, or the stillness of the rustic lanes in its vicinity, may have proved as propitious to his Muse as they did in later times to those of Keats and Shelley. At all events, to breathe the air upon its heights must have made him who was brimful of the love of Nature feel as the gods felt when respiring that of Olympus—sublimely indifferent to mundane matters. Then the garrulous, flighty talker grew serene: he ‘communed with his own heart, and was still.’ [Illustration: _Goldsmith._] Here, possibly, some portions of the ‘Traveller’ may have been thought out, that poem which modified for Miss Reynolds the ugliness of the sallow, melancholy-looking man with heavy, protuberant forehead, and grim frown between the brows, the result of thought which not even his friends gave him credit for, but whose ‘ill-natured eyes,’ as he himself calls them, grew tender with compassion at the sight of want and sorrow.[160]