BRIXTON HILL 99 



built a century ago, or thereby. They are not 

 beautiful, nor indeed are they ugly. Built of good 

 yellow stock brick, grown decorously neutral-tinted 

 with age, and sparsely relieved, it may be, with stucco 

 pilasters picked out with raised medallions or plaster 

 wreaths. Supremely unimaginative, admirably free 

 from tawdry affectations of Art, unquestionably 

 permanent — and large. They are, indeed, of such 

 spaciousness and commodious quality that an 

 auctioneer who all his life long has been ascribing 

 those characteristics to houses which do not possess 

 them feels a vast despair possess his soul when it falls 

 to his lot to professionally describe such an one. And 

 yet I think few ever realise the scale of these villas 

 and their grounds until the houses themselves are 

 pulled down and the grounds laid out as building plots 

 for what we now understand by " villas " — a fate that 



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has lately befallen a few. When it is realised that the 

 site lately occupied by one of these staid mansions and 

 its surrounding gardens will presently harbour thirty 

 or forty little modern houses — why, then an unwonted 

 respect is felt for it and its kind. 



Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the 

 Thames. The hideous church of Brixton stands on 

 the crest of it, with the hulking monument of the 

 Budd family, all scarabei and classic emblems of death, 

 prominent at the angle of the roads — a memento mori, 

 ever since the twenties, for travellers down the road. 



Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect 

 proves that grief, as well as joy and everything else 

 human, passes, is one in shape like a biscuit-box, to 

 John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. 

 A verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the 

 pavements of Brixton Hill, accompanies name and date : 



O Miles ! the modest, learned and sincere 

 Will sigh for thee, whose ashes shimher here ; 

 The youthful hard will pluck a floweret pale 

 From this sad turf whene'er he reads the tale, 

 That one so young and lovely — died — and last, 

 When the sun's vigour warms, or tempests rave, 

 Shall come in summer's hloom and winter's blast, 

 A Mother, to weep o'er this hopeless grave. 



