Occupying a commanding position on the west of the Green was the stately mansion Dorchester {35} House, the seat of Henry, Marquis of Dorchester, from whom it was purchased in the reign of Charles II. by the eccentric philanthropist William Blake, who turned it into a school that ceased to exist in 1688. The mansion, after various vicissitudes, was pulled down; and in one of the houses, now No. 3 The Grove, that were built on its site, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived as the paying-guest of a surgeon named Gilman for nineteen years. There he was often visited by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Henry Crabb Robinson, Edward Irving, Mr. and Mrs. Cowden Clarke--the latter of whom has eloquently described her stay with the poet in her charming book, _My Long Life_--and Thomas Carlyle, who dwelt enthusiastically on the glorious view from the windows of the house, that is still, by the way, much what it was in Coleridge's time. The parish church of Highgate, in which there is a tablet with a long inscription to the memory of Coleridge, and part of the cemetery occupy the site of the mansion-house built in 1694 by Sir William Ashurst, then Lord Mayor of London, and the villas of the present Fitzroy Park replace a fine old house erected in 1780 by Lord Southampton, and named after him. In one of the new houses on this beautiful estate lived the well-known sanitary reformer Dr. Southwood Smith, and near to the Park is Dufferin Lodge, the seat of Lord Dufferin, that was the maiden home of the eloquent writer, the Honourable Mrs. Norton, grand-daughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. {36} In a little house known as the Hermitage, on West Hill, where a modern terrace now stands, and opposite to which there used to be an ash-tree popularly supposed to have been planted by Nelson when he was a boy, dwelt the notorious gambler Sir Wallis Porter, who was often joined there by the Prince Regent; and it was in it that the forger Henry Fauntleroy is said to have long lain hidden from the officers of the law in search of him. In Millfield Lane, and in the charming little Ivy Cottage, now enlarged and known as Brookfield House, the famous comedian, Charles Mathews, dwelt for many years. Millfield Cottage, next door to it, was for a time a favourite retreat of John Ruskin, and in the same lane, as related by Leigh Hunt in his _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries_, John Keats presented his brother poet with a volume of his poems, the first of many generous gifts.