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A foreigner, the fellow-countryman of Joannes a Commenius, as he pedantically styles John Amos Comenius, the Moravian grammarian and divine, had established a school at Hampstead for a ‘limited number of young gentlemen,’ the number being restricted to twelve, and these, Mr. Spark tells us, he spared no pains in training:

‘For he, on top of all (this tree) above the shade,

His scholars, taught; where they such verses made

As spread his honours, and do blaze the fame

Of Hampstead School—I’ll trumpet up the same!’

It is he who lets us into the seeming secret of the birth of the Wells, and sings of the

‘air, and hill, and well, and school,’

as if the reputation of each was publicly known and appreciated. Codrington indirectly tells us that the elm was attempted to be put to another use ‘by some of the new religion, that would make a preachment beneath its shade.’

In the reign of Charles II., when the Great Plague was ravaging London and the Merry Monarch and his merry Court had discreetly withdrawn from its neighbourhood, Hampstead and the Heath had other experiences, for hundreds of the wretched citizens who had fled from the city to the suburbs, driven forth from the village with scythes and pitchforks, lay down to die in the fields and woods and ditches in the vicinity. This was the occasion of the obloquy levelled at the Hampstead people by Taylor, the Water-poet. And as a consequence, having almost wholly escaped the visitations of 1603, Hampstead suffered considerably in 1665, when the burials—which in the first year of the plague numbered only seven, and in the next twenty-three—rose to 214, more than seven times the ordinary averages of the period.[30]