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CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
HAMPSTEAD HEATH.
BY MEAD AND STREAM.
THE MUSE OF PARODY.
TWO DAYS IN A LIFETIME.
GLIMPSES OF THE SCOT ABROAD.
IS SMOKING INJURIOUS TO HEALTH?
TO A CHILD.
No. 5.—Vol. I.
Price 1½d.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1884.
HAMPSTEAD HEATH.
Hampstead Heath! What a world of delightseemed concentrated in that name in the daysof childhood, when donkey-riding was not yettoo undignified an amusement, and a gallop ‘crosscountry’ through the bracken and furze struckterror into the heart of nurse or parent, andcovered the rider with glory! Such feats ofhorsemanship now belong to the irrevocable past;but yet no part of the great ‘province of houses’known as London brings such pleasant memoriesas the quaint old village on its northern outskirtsand the wild breezy heath that bounds it. Evennow, Hampstead is rather in London, than ofit, and keeps up customs that have died out elsewhere.There, on the fifth of November, a gallantprocession takes its way through its steep windingstreets, and the centuries mingle with as littleregard to accuracy as they might do in a schoolboy’sdream the night before an examination inhistory. Gallant Crusaders in chain-mail, withthe red cross embroidered on their flowing whitemantles, jostle very nineteenth-century Guardsmen,who in their turn seem to feel no surpriseat seeing Charles I. in velvet doublet and lacecollar talking amicably to a motley, spangledharlequin. But were the inhabitants in thistheir yearly carnival to picture the history oftheir village and of the notable personages whohave lived in it, they might make a pageant aslong and varied as any that imagination caninvent.
The manor of Hampstead was given by Edwardthe Confessor to the monks of Westminster; andsubsequent monarchs conferred on them theneighbouring manors of Belsize and Hendon.It was at Hendon Manor-house that CardinalWolsey made his first halt when journeying fromRichmond to York after his disgrace. At thattime, however, Hampstead itself had no greatclaim to notice, its inhabitants being, we are told,chiefly washerwomen, whose services were in greatdemand among the inhabitants of London. Thatthis peaceful if humble occupation could becarried on, proves at least that the wolves which,according to Dame Juliana Berners’s Boke of StAlbans, abounded among the northern heightsof London in the fifteenth century, had beenextermi