Introduction.]

one of a sudden and impulsive nature, consequent on some great panic or mania for building that may have seized on the commercial world—after the fashion of the "railway mania" of forty years ago -may be inferred when we state that Horace Walpole thus writes to his friend Sir Horace Mann, under date 1791 :-"There will soon be one street from London to Brentford; aye, and from London to every village ten miles round!" The era of which he prophesied has long since arrived; and not only Brentford, but Hounslow, is now connected with the metropolis by an almost unbroken row of bricks and mortar, in the shape of cottages, shops, and villas.

The elder D'Israeli, in "The Curiosities of Literature," mentions some remarkable features of the dread which our countrymen entertained of an overgrown metropolis :-" Proclamations warned and exhorted; but the very interference of a royal prohibition seemed to render the metropolis more charming;" though for all this, from Elizabeth to Charles II., proclamations continually issued against new erections. James I. notices "those swarms of gentry who, through the instigation of their wives, did neglect their country hospitality, and cumber the city a general nuisance to the kingdom." He once said "Gentlemen resident on their estates are like ships in port, their value and magnitude are felt and acknowledged; but when at a distance, as their size seemed insignificant, so their worth and importance were not duly estimated." The England even of the present century is changed out of all possible knowledge; indeed, those are yet living who can look back with a smile at the solemn county balls, which were almost as difficult of access, and as jealously guarded, as a Court presentation of these days.

Nor were good reasons wanted for eschewing London. Only two centuries ago a Sussex squire, Mr. Palmer, was fined in the sum of £1,000 for residing in London rather than on his own estate in the country, and that even in face of the fact that his country mansion had been burned within the two years before his trial took place! We are told that this sentence struck terror into the London sojourners; and it was followed by a proclamation for them to leave the city, with their "wives and families, and also widows." And now we have no difficulty in understanding why there are so many large mansions in small country towns. The habit of making the best of a hard lot influenced the gentry even long after it would have been safe to have followed Mr. Palmer's example; and so we find, up to the Hanoverian period, large oldfashioned houses in some small country towns, that look, as Dickens says, as if they had lost

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their way in infancy, and grown to their present proportions. The tendency of families to migrate to the county town instead of London in the "season," was partly owing to the difficulty of the roads (for nothing now in England can give an idea of the undertaking of a journey of 200 miles to London), but partly, also, to a singular law, which forbade, as far as possible, any country gentleman who was not in Parliament from residing in London. Railways, of course, have rapidly and completely changed the scene. The old moralist in Thackeray laments the change of times, when a man of quality used to enter London, or return to his country-house, in a coach and pair, with outriders, and now his son "slinks" from the station in a brougham.

Whether or not the architectural aspect of the streets of London is being improved by the wholesale demolition of its ancient buildings, and the erection on their sites of huge warehouses and commercial edifices, is not for us to say; but a great advance has certainly been made of late years in the architectural appearance of the better class of suburban residences. It is true that there are many excellent specimens of house architecture even of Queen Anne's reign in remote villages within twenty miles of London. Many of these houses are now turned into boarding-schools or village tenements, having been shouldered out of the way as ugly and old-fashioned. But a reaction has at last set in against the massive and tasteless style so long characteristic of town and suburban buildings, and houses of the Queen Anne type are being erected in the suburbs on every side of London.

With all this, there are happily many places round London still unbuilt upon, within the limits of our present work, to which the cockney holiday. maker may take a day's excursion, where he will find the fields still green, the hedgerows fresh, and the forest-trees in summer-time in full leaf, and waving bravely in the breeze. That portion of the county of Surrey which will fall within the scope of our peregrinations has, to a very large extent, up to the present time, kept clear of the man of bricks and mortar. Indeed, it is not a little remarkable that a county so near to the metropolis should still contain so large an amount of waste lands. At the beginning of the present century it was reckoned that a sixth of its whole acreage was in a wild and uncultivated state; but this condition of things has been greatly altered by enclosures. Still, however, near London there are Wimbledon Common and Putney Heath, Wandsworth and Clapham Commons, Streatham, Tooting, and Kennington Commons—in all, nearly 2,000

acres. Farther afield are Bagshot Heath, Epsom, Leatherhead, Ashtead, Weybridge, Epping Forest, and other open spots, of many of which we shall have occasion to speak.

This area, almost every nook and corner of which-thanks to our railway system-may be visited on the Saturday afternoon holidays in summer, and most of them even in winter, contains, as we need hardly add, much that may interest the ordinary visitor, should he care for quiet and peaceful rural scenery, or the artist who may be in search of choice "bits." It does not include in its sphere a single cathedral, or castle, or abbey, at all events with extensive buildings above ground; but there are breezy heights commanding extensive views, mansions, and other buildings possessing historical associations; and we have only to mention a few names of places and persons who have been connected with it as residents, or by the accident of birth or death, in order to satisfy the reader that these five hundred and odd square miles are not devoid of interest. There are, for instance, Waltham Cross and Abbey, the latter traditionally the grave of the unhappy Harold; there is Chislehurst, with its memories of the antiquary Camden and the emperor Louis Napoleon; there are Hayes and Keston, the favourite haunts of Pitt and Wilberforce; there is Isleworth, with its monastery of Sion; Harrow, with its school and its memories of Byron's youth. At Hounslow we shall find camps and footpads; the latter also at Finchley; at Merton we shall come upon Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton; at Stanmore we shall visit the grave of Lord Aberdeen; at Mortlake we shall find Dr. Dee; at Elstree we shall rub shoulders with Thurtell and Hare; at "princely" Canons we shall be introduced to George Handel, and to his patron, the Duke of Chandos; at Wanstead we shall see the magnificent mansion of the Tylneys, brought to ruin, alas! by a Wellesley; at Gunnersbury, at Kew, at Brentford, at Kingsbury, at Nonsuch, at Enfield, and in Hainault Forest, royal memories will meet us; and we shall be overwhelmed by them when we come to Richmond and Sheen; Pope and Horace Walpole, Kitty Clive, Gay, Thomson, and a host of children of the Muses, will surround us at Twickenham; at Barnet we shall view the battle-field which crushed the hopes of the house of Lancaster; at Bexley we shall encounter the cavalcade of Chaucer's "Canterbury Pilgrims," whom we left at the Tabard in Southwark; at Barking we shall walk over

the site of perhaps the earliest convent for ladies in England, full of sacred memories; at Theobalds we shall find King James, with all his wit and pedantry; at Edmonton we shall shake hands with Charles Lamb; at Croydon we shall have much to talk about in the long roll of primates who occupied the palace there till Addington became their home; at Epsom we shall see "the quality" drinking the waters, and Lord Derby and his friends inaugurating those races whose name is not only national, but world-wide; at Beddington we shall find the Carews and Sir Walter Raleigh; at Kew and Brentford we shall run up against "Farmer George" taking his morning rides; and at Kingston-on-Thames and at Hampton Court we shall reconnoitre the spots on which our Saxon kings were crowned, and our Tudor sovereigns and their courtiers walked and talked. In each and all of these places, and a score of others, we shall try to bring our readers face to face with the great men and women who have added a light to the pages of English history, and, we doubt not, greatly to the advantage of the former, without doing harm to the latter, or calling them up from their silent graves. In this way we shall hope to render the history of our land more full of enjoyment than heretofore, investing its heroes and heroines with the interest which attaches to personages who live and move amongst us, and have been animated by like passions with ourselves. Our notices of them, as a rule, cannot be more than brief, but that is the necessary result of our plan, which may, indeed, be thought open to the charge of being desultory, though we hope that it will be acquitted of dulness and of malice.

With these few remarks by way of introduction or preface, we once more beg the reader to take in hand his pilgrim's staff, and to accompany us on our pleasant pilgrimage.

We ended our sketches of "Old and New London" near Chiswick Church and Turnham Green, and therefore it would seem but natural to begin again where we left off. Accordingly, while the Scotchman-if we may believe Dr. Johnson-always travels south, and never looks behind him, we shall trudge along in a westerly direction for some days, and pursue our way leisurely up the valley of the Thames, which, at all events, will have much more to detain us now than it had in those unreckoned ages when it was an estuary of the silent sea.