ON HIGHGATE HILL IN 1852

Readers of the following random recollections and now and then, I hope, not obtrusive reflections, will not, I am afraid, find them as interesting as the somewhat mythical but capital little story of Dick Whittington and his cat. I venture to refer to young Whittington, because by a curious coincidence I found myself on Highgate Hill early one morning in 1852, walking into London. Whittington, when he lay sleeping on the London side of the old northern height, had run away from his employer and, as pictured in some of the accounts of his life, from a stout, greasy-looking cook-maid, who was apt to drub him with a large wooden spoon or ladle. In his sleep, Master Whittington thought he heard church bells ring, “Turn again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.” If our dear old household fairy story does refer to the Sir Richard Whittington who lived in part of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the old bells might have told him to turn again and be three times Lord Mayor of London, for the Sir Richard Whittington of that time was Lord Mayor in 1397, again in 1406, and again in 1419. So it would seem that there was a smaller number of candidates for the Mayoralty chair in the old days than in our own. To be three times Mayor of London was no great event, for it seems that one of the first, if not the first, Mayor of London, was Henry Fitzalwyn, who in about Henry the Second's time held the office of Mayor for twenty-four consecutive years.