Although the fame of its college and gallery has long since eclipsed that of its spa, Dulwich was at one time much frequented by the wealthy citizens of London, who resorted there to drink the waters of a spring near the Green Man Inn, the site of which was later occupied by the private school of Dr. Glennie, pulled down in its turn in 1825, in which Lord Byron was a pupil for two years. There was a rival well in the neighbouring hamlet of Sydenham {135} that was even more popular, but all traces of both are now lost, and there is absolutely nothing about the densely populated neighbourhood dominated by the Crystal Palace, to recall the days when Campbell lived in the old house still standing on Peak Hill, where he wrote 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' 'O'Connor's Child,' and the 'Battle of the Baltic.' The view from the terrace of the palace itself is of course much the same in its general features as that upon which the poet looked down, but the forest in which he used to wander, that gave its name to Forest Hill, is replaced by a sea of villas with no special character about them. Fortunately the palace, in spite of the north wing having been destroyed by fire in 1866, is a dignified-looking structure. It was built with the materials and partly on the plan of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the public are to be congratulated on the fact that its three hundred acres of grounds preserve some of their original rural character when the district was one of the most beautiful near London. [Illustration: THE CRYSTAL PALACE] Anerley, once famed for its tea-gardens; Gypsy Hill, long the haunt of Zingari squatters; Norwood, or the wood north of Croydon; Streatham, long the home of Mrs. Piozzi, with whom Dr. Johnson often stayed; and Penge, that appears in an early nineteenth-century map as a town with one inn, the Crooked Billet, were all for many centuries outlying settlements, each with a distinctive charm of its own, the last-named set in the midst of a wide-stretching common crossed by the Croydon Canal with many picturesque locks, now replaced by the {136} iron road, the levelling influence of which is apparent on every side. [Sidenote: Hayes]