Hampstead, but it was reserved to an American lady, Miss Anne Whitney, who presented his bust to the Parish Church in 1895, to give practical proof of a desire to do him honour in the district he loved so well. The Arctic explorer, Sir Edward Parry, is said to have had his headquarters at Hampstead; Prince Talleyrand lived in Pond Street during his exile from France; and Edward Irving, founder of the Irvingite sect, is said to have had a house there for a short time. The historian Sir Thomas Palgrave resided on the Green from 1834 to 1861; the poet William Allingham died in Lyndhurst Road in 1889; the novelist Diana Muloch, and the less celebrated Elizabeth Meteyard, were often in the neighbourhood. The mother of Lord Tennyson shared Rosemount, in Flask Walk, with her daughter, and was often visited there by her illustrious son. Sir Rowland Hill, the famous Postmaster-General, resided for thirty years and died at Bertram House, near St. Stephen's Church, and Hampstead was long the home of the novelist Sir Walter Besant and the well-known bibliophile Dr. Garnett. What may perhaps be called the art era of Hampstead, when it became associated with the names of the most distinguished painters of England, was inaugurated at the end of the eighteenth century by the arrival there of George Romney, who took a house on the hill long supposed to have been that {19} now known as the Mount, in Heath Street, though the recent discovery of a deed of tenancy seems to prove it to have been Prospect House on Cloth Hill, now the Constitutional Club. However that may be, the artist soon found his new quarters too small, and built on to them a large studio for the painting of historic pictures, which Flaxman, who visited him in it, called a fantastic structure, and in which, later, when it had become the Holly Bush Assembly Rooms, Constable gave lectures on landscape painting to the members of the Literary and Scientific Society of Hampstead. Romney did little or no work in Hampstead, for his health was already undermined when he embarked on his new enterprise, and his sojourn left no permanent impress on the neighbourhood, when he fled to Kendal to die in the arms of his long-neglected wife.