Within easy reach of the 'Spaniards' and Jack Straw's Castle, in a house still named after him, dwelt the great lawyer Lord Erskine, who defended Lord George Gordon at the latter's trial for high treason, securing his acquittal; and the broad holly hedge dividing the garden from the Heath, as well as the wood of laurel and bay trees, on what is known as Evergreen Hill, are said to have been planted by his own hands. At Heath House, on the highest point of the Heath, lived Samuel Hoare, the enlightened lover of literature and defender of the oppressed, who was the first to advocate the cause of the negro in England, and amongst his many distinguished guests were the poets Samuel Rogers, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Campbell, and Coleridge, the noted writer John James Park, the first historian of Hampstead, whose work, on its Topography and Natural History, published in 1814, is still the chief authority on the subject up to that date; the philanthropist William Wilberforce, and the not less devoted Sir Samuel Buxton, who succeeded him in 1824 as leader of the anti-slavery party. Bolton House, on Windmill Hill, was long the home of the cultivated sisters Joanna and Agnes {17} Baillie, with whom Sir David Wilkie sometimes stayed, and Mrs. Barbauld, whose husband was minister of the Presbyterian chapel on Rosslyn Hill, lived first in a house near to them, and later in one in Church Row. Mrs. Siddons, after her retirement from the stage, occupied for several years the house known as Capo di Monte, overlooking the beautiful Judges' Walk, beneath the elms of which assizes are said to have been held in 1663, when the Great Plague of London was raging. The poet-painter William Blake sometimes stayed at a farm at North End, the same later frequented by John Linnell; and the Vale of Health, in which stood the picturesque cottage owned by Leigh Hunt, will be for ever associated with the memory of that eloquent writer and of the greater John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, all of whom are known to have visited him there. Keats was with him for some days in 1816, and in 1817 took rooms in what is now No. 1 Well Walk, where he wrote the greater part of _Endymion_. Later he went to board with his friend Charles Armitage Brown in a house at the bottom of John Street, known as Lawn Bank, and marked by a tablet, next door to which lived Charles Wentworth Dilke, later editor of the _Athenæum_, by whom the poet was introduced to Fanny Brawne, with whom he fell in love at first sight. _Hyperion_, the _Eve of St. Agnes_, and five of the six celebrated sonnets were written at Lawn Bank, and Keats was looking forward to his marriage with his beloved Fanny when the illness which was to prove fatal began. She and her mother nursed him with the {18} utmost devotion, but nothing could save him, and he was already doomed when he left them to go to Rome in 1821. His memory is still held in great honour in