KEATS AT ENFIELD

It is now a hundred years since John Keats was sent to school at Enfield. His father, a well-to-do liverystable keeper in Finsbury, came to a tragical end within a few months, being thrown from his horse and killed while riding home from Southgate, another little town in the same district. This sad event seems to have affected the future poet in several ways. It led to his falling entirely under the influence, one cannot correctly say the control, of his mother and of her mother, Mrs. Jennings, who lived near, if not in Enfield. His mother appears, like himself, to have been the creature of impulse, and her imprudent second marriage, soon after his father's death, no doubt had its place in forming his mind. If we remember the condition of Southgate and Enfield at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we can understand better something of the boy's turn of mind. The dark woods which covered the northern parts of Middlesex, many fragments of which still remain, were calculated, even without the fatal accident in their midst which deprived John Keats of his father, to lead him to dwell on their mysterious depths and to

be attracted or repelled by their gloom. As he grew older, he peopled them in imagination with visions, often dismal. There were fairies and elfin grots in the woods with pale kings and princes, but again they took a more cheerful aspect, and we have "woodland alleys never ending," and "bowery clefts and leafy shades." All these things, whether grave or gay, whether sad or joyful, he found in abundance close to where he lived, and there is scarcely a natural allusion or an elaborate simile in all his work which may not be traced to the unfading impressions made upon his mind in his early life at Enfield.

Within a very few years the whole aspect of this suburban village has been altered. It used to consist of a quiet street or two, interspersed with many trees, and much ivy, set off by old red brick. Then came the railway, and the scenery was speedily changed. The handsome house, with its Georgian façade, of "fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick," in which Mr. John Clarke kept his school, was pulled down to make way for the station; the streets were filled with gaudy shops; and the ancient roads, with their gardens and clipped hedges, their ironwork and gate pillars, their velvet lawns on which small-paned bow windows looked out, were turned into rows of neatly stuccoed villas; trees were cut down, and a view of factory chimneys terminates what had been a sylvan vista with a faint line of blue hills.

There still long remained but little injured such

picturesque roads as the once famous Baker Street. It led north-east from Enfield towards Clay Hill and Forty Hill on the way to Cheshunt. For a mile or more it consisted of red-brick houses separated by gardens and well-wooded pleasaunces. The houses were of the most orthodox "Queen Anne" pattern, or what in America is described as "Colonial." The gardens were enclosed by low walls, finished off with brick posts topped by large balls. Toward the roadway each of these "compounds" had a wrought-iron railing of elaborate pattern, suggesting that an artist had been at work when the houses were built, perhaps the great Tijou himself who designed the grilles at St. Paul's and at Hampton Court. All these mansions, though oldfashioned, were in perfect preservation, and each had its name and history when Keats was at school. It is not yet twenty years since the first of them was pulled down to make way for a row of small-and hideous— houses. For the railway had brought London to Enfield, and, as if to proclaim its destructive mission, began operations by the removal of one of the most beautiful and most interesting of the older buildings. This, as I have said, was the school kept by John Clarke, a clergyman, the father of Charles Cowden Clarke, one of Keats's earliest friends. The house had other claims on our regard. Mr. Colvin says

of it :

The schoolhouse occupied by Mr. Clarke had originally been built for a rich West Indian merchant, in the finest style of early

Georgian classic architecture, and stood in a pleasant and spacious garden at the lower end of the town. When, years afterwards, the site was used for a railway station, the old house was for some time allowed to stand; but later it was taken down, and the façade, with its fine proportions and rich ornaments in moulded brick, was transported to South Kensington Museum as a choice example of the style.

Thorne, in his Environs of London, though he says nothing of Keats at Enfield, adds considerably both to our knowledge of the house and also to the associations which clustered round it. According to this account, just before Clarke set up his school here, it was in the occupation of Isaac Disraeli, whose father, Benjamin, had settled here soon after his coming to England in 1748. His distinguished grandson and namesake says of him, "He made his fortune in the midway of life, and settled near Enfield, where he formed an Italian garden, entertained his friends, played whist with Sir Horace Mann, who was his great acquaintance, and who had known his brother at Venice as a banker." Thorne, when he has made this quotation from Lord Beaconsfield, goes on, unconsciously, to correct, in one not unimportant particular, the account given by Mr. Colvin of the house. "Its beautiful façade and tracerywork of carved brick, probably unrivalled in England, is doomed to destruction by the march of mechanics." Mr. Colvin speaks of "moulded brick," which would surely not have been worth preserving “as a screen in the architectural section" at South Kensington.

Before we leave the old-fashioned streets and market

place of Enfield to seek in the neighbouring woods and the royal chase for Keats's sources of poetic inspiration, we must pay a short visit to the church and glance at those monuments which were here when the boy attended service within the old walls. We must endeavour to realise what, in the mind of a well-read and intelligent visitor, probably stood out most prominently.

A hundred years ago the operation known as "church restoration" had not been invented. It had not been discovered that parishioners who had an old church should be ashamed to let it appear old. Association still went for something, and men were proud to sit in the pews where their fathers and mothers had sat, and to see the old funeral hatchments bearing their family arms still hanging on the walls. Enfield Church had not been "restored" in Keats's time. It retained marks of the style in which it had been built while the hundred years of strife which we call the Wars of the Roses raged among the Middlesex hills and through the adjoining Chase. The most ancient and conspicuous of the monuments is that of a lady, majority of whose relations and friends perished ther or at the hands of the headsman. At the battle of Barnet the King-maker and his brother were slain with so many others of the old nobility. Barnet is the next parish. Much of the fighting was in Enfield Chase. Jocosa, in Latin, or Joyce, in English, was her name, and she was Lady Tiptoft, the daughter of Lord