I forgot to thank you for the last edition of the Handbook, but I have found leisure to look into it, and have read many parts of it with great interest. It is really a useful and amusing work for those who do not travel. Do not you think that a very interesting work might be written, to be entitled, ‘A Historical Account of the Celebrated Villas in the Neighbourhood of London?’ I mean rather the villas that have been, than those that now exist. Look at Horace Walpole’s ‘Song on Strawberry Hill.’ How many places are there mentioned which have historical recollections connected with them, which would be worth preserving? There must be always great interest about the localities in the neighbourhood of the Metropolis. In that Song alone are mentioned Gunnersbury, Sion, Chiswick, Strawberry Hill, Greenwich, Marble Hill, Oatlands, Claremont, Southcote. You might add Wanstead, Wimbledon, Holland House, and a hundred others—many with very curious anecdotes of local and personal history connected with them. Perhaps I overrate the interest with which such a book would be read. I certainly do not, if it would equal that which I myself read the account of places in the neighbourhood of Paris, remarkable in history, but the traces of many of which are fast fading away; such as Maisons, Meudon, Sceaux, Chantilly, &c. Hampton Court, the ancient palace at Richmond, Kew, and others, might enter into the work. The County Histories would furnish a substratum, but everything would depend upon the liveliness and accuracy of the details.
