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The clean-swept paths, the flowery garden-graves, the close-mown turf, the shrubs and bowering trees, and the varied, often elegant tombs amongst them, give Hampstead churchyard an air of beautiful repose and quiet.[70] Two magnificent yew-trees with straight, tall, channelled trunks, centuries old, spread their wide horizontal branches over spaces ‘sacred to many sorrows.’ Beneath the first of them, to the east, is the grave of Sir James Macintosh, ‘a man,’ says Mr. Howitt, ‘of grave, practical, useful, and moderately reforming character and talents, rather than of that broad and original stamp which marks the foremost leaders of mankind.’

If we take the first path to the left hand on entering the graveyard, we pass on the side nearest the wall the tombstone of Henry Cort, ironmaster, who greatly improved the manufacture of British iron, and according to Mr. William Fairbairn, in his ‘History of Iron and its Manufacture,’ conferred on his country during the last three or four generations equivalent to six hundred millions sterling, and has given employment to six hundred thousand of the working population, but who himself was suffered to die of disappointment and broken fortune in the sixtieth year of his age. Passing on to the second cross on the right of this path, we find the headstone which marks the simple grave of Lucy Aikin, who lies at the feet of her friend and neighbour, Joanna Baillie, whose railed-in altar-tomb has still a little footpath worn by pilgrims’ feet on the grass beside it.