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But it is not of ‘’Appy ’Amstead’ that I am about to write, but of that older Hampstead the materials for the history of which lie scattered through many books not often read, and in the correspondence of dead men and women.

Lysons and Park are not for general readers, and such works as William Howitt’s ‘Northern Heights’ and Baines’s ‘Records of Hampstead’ are not companionable volumes. Yet I know of no intermediate work between them and mere guide-books.

Hence it occurred to me that I might fill a vacant place in the literature of ‘Sweet Hampstead,’ and give to others, without the toil, the pleasure I have had in recalling forgotten incidents connected with it, and memories of some of the celebrated men and women who, from the days of Queen Anne till our own, have added to the intrinsic delights of the place the charm of their association with it.

When the idea of undertaking ‘this labour of love’ occurred to me, the window near which I loved to write commanded a last fragmentary view of Gospel Oak Fields, which divided Hampstead from the parish of St. Pancras. These fields were even then (early in the sixties) in the hands of speculative builders, but a few green hedges, a group of elms, a pollard oak or two—scions, perhaps, of the traditionary one that for centuries had given its name to these now obliterated prata et pasturas—remained.