It was another thing when, ceasing to be a mere Grub Street hack, he moved to Wine Office Court, and gave suppers, and came hither for a ‘shoemaker’s holiday,’ as he expressed it, with his ‘Jolly Pigeon’ friends. But at the period I am now writing of, Goldsmith was correcting the press for Mr. Samuel Richardson, the literary bookseller of Salisbury Court, whose epistolary novels, as we know, had taken the town by storm, and who himself frequently figured in the shady Hampstead Well walk, as also at Tunbridge Wells, where Loggan, the dwarf,[161] had included him amongst others of our Hampstead celebrities who frequented that pleasant sanatorium: Old Colley Cibber, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, Garrick, and Mrs. Fraisi, the singer, whose fine, expansive person and expensive dress made an important appearance in the walks. Then the trees, or groups of them, the ponds, the little dells, the piquant ‘come and see what I can show you’ eminences! The old, solid, red or brown brick mansions; that speak of ‘successful commercial enterprise, and its sequel of splendid wealth.’ And, better still, in the shadow of an old lane, an early Georgian house of ruddy brick, unfaded by centuries of storm and sunshine, with a white gallery running round it like a ruff, and a lovely oriel looking to the sunsets.[162] Then the avenues that have some way got adrift from the homes they once led to, and are left stranded on the Heath, and the sweet, tree-shaded lanes; but these are, alas! for the most part lost to us, like the woods, the site of a once-great gathering of them, that had a history before the Conquest, though the history is lost to us, like the concluding chapters of Livy. The oldest inhabitant of Hampstead will tell you that he does not know the whole of it, and a workman once informed the writer that he had daily crossed the Heath to his employment for many years, but he believed that he had scarcely ever found his way across it or back by precisely the same path. Undoubtedly, Hampstead has the merit of infinite variety, and the charm of compelling those who know it to desire a return to it with great longing. Even the separate districts into which it is now nominally divided have a distinctive character of their own, and West End is no more like Frognal than South End is like North End or Church Row. [Illustration: _North End from the Heath._]