Old Chelsea: A Summer-Day's Stroll

A little farther on, just west of Oakley Street, on the outer edge of the roadway of Cheyne Walk, stood, until within a few months, another old sign, at which I was wont to look in delight, unshamed by the mute mockery of the passing Briton, who wondered what the sentimental prowler could see to attract him in this rusty relic.  It stood in front of the little public-house lately burned to the ground—“The Magpie and Stump:” two solid posts carrying a wide cross-piece, all bristling with spikes for the impalement of the climbing boy of the period; “Magpie and Stump, Quoit Grounds,” in dingy letters on the outer side, once plain for all rowing men to read from the river; above was an iron Magpie on an iron Stump, both decrepid with age, and a rusty old weathercock, too stiff to turn even the letter E—alone left of the four points of the compass.  Between these posts might still be traced the top stone of an old water-staircase, embedded now in the new-made ground which forms the embankment garden here; just as you might have seen, only the other day, the water-stairs of Whitehall Palace, which have now been carted away.  Up this staircase Queen Elizabeth has often stepped, on her frequent visits to the rich and powerful Earl of Shrewsbury, her devoted subject and friend.  For, on the river slope, just back of Cheyne Walk here, stood, until the second decade of this century, Shrewsbury House, another one of Chelsea’s grand mansions.  It was an irregular brick structure, much gabled, built about a quadrangle; although but one storey in height it was sufficiently spacious, its great room being one hundred and twenty feet in length, wainscotted in finely carved oak, and its oratory painted to resemble marble.  In a circular room there was concealed a trap-door, giving entrance to a winding stairway, which led to an underground passage; believed to have opened on the river wall at low tide, and to have twisted inland to the “Black Horse” in Chelsea, and thence to Holland House, Kensington.  Local gossip claims that it was used by the Jacobites of 1745, and perhaps of 1715, too; for they made their rendezvous by the river at this tavern, and here drank to their “King over the water.”  In the grounds of the “Magpie and Stump” is a wooden trapdoor, through which I once descended by stone steps into a paved stone passage, sufficiently wide and high for two to pass, standing erect.  This bit is all that remains of the old tunnel—the river portion being used as a coal-hole, the inland end soon stopped up and lost in neighbouring cellars.

The wife of this Earl of Shrewsbury is well worth our attention for a moment, by reason of her beauty, her character, her romantic career, her many marriages.  Elizabeth Hardwick of Derby became Mrs. Barley at the age of fourteen, and was a wealthy widow when only sixteen; she soon married Sir William Cavendish, ancestor of the Duke of Devonshire; to be widowed soon again, and soon to become the wife of Sir William St. Loo, Captain of Queen Elizabeth’s Guard.  His death left her still so lovely, witty, attractive, as to captivate the greatest subject in the land; and she became the Countess of Shrewsbury; having risen regularly in riches, position, power, with each of her marriages.  After the death of her fourth husband she consented to remain a widow.  At her death, seventeen years later, she bequeathed this Chelsea mansion to her son William, afterward the first Duke of Devonshire; together with the three grandest seats in England—Hardwick, Oldcoates, Chatsworth—all builded by her at successive stages of her eventful career.

A step farther westward along Cheyne Walk and we turn into Lawrence Street; at the upper end of which, at the corner of Justice Walk, we shall find, in the cellars of “The Prince of Wales” tavern and of the adjoining houses, the remains of the ovens and baking-rooms of the famous Chelsea China factory.  For it stood just here during the short forty years of its existence, having been established in 1745.  Why it failed and why the factory was torn down, no one seems to know; for its work was extremely fine, and its best ware—turned out from 1750 to 1765—was equal to that of Sèvres.  Skilled foreign artizans had been brought over, and an extraordinary specimen of unskilled native workman appeared in Dr. Samuel Johnson.  The old scholar conceived the idea that he could make china as admirably as he could make a dictionary; but he never mastered the secret of mixing, and each piece of his cracked in the baking!  He used to come out here twice a week, his old housekeeper carrying his basket of food for the day; and was made free of the whole factory, except the mixing-room.  They presented him with a full service of their own make, properly baked, however; which he gave or bequeathed to Mrs. Piozzo, and which, at the sale of her effects, was bought by Lord Holland.  In “Holland House by Kensington”—to use its good old title—I have seen it, carefully preserved among the other famed curios.

“This is Danvers Street, begun in ye Yeare 1696,” says the quaint old lettering in a corner house of Cheyne Walk; and this street marks the site of Danvers House, which had formed part of More’s property—perhaps the “new buildinge”—and which had gone to his son-in-law, Roper.  It came afterward to be owned by Sir John Danvers, a gentleman-usher of Charles I., and he made a superb place of it; of which the deep foundations and the fallen columns now lie under Paultons Square, at the upper end of the street.  Sir John Danvers was the second husband of Magdalen Herbert, a woman notable for her famous family of boys: her first son was that strong and strange original, Lord Herbert of Cherbury; her fifth son was George Herbert, of undying memory.  The poet lived here for a while.  Donne, the preacher, then at Oxford, used to stop at her house on his visits to London; and when he became Vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, in the Strand, near Isaac Walton’s old shop in Chancery Lane, and had converted the Gentle Angler, these two certainly strolled often out here together.  Donne preached Lady Danvers’ funeral sermon in Old Chelsea Church in 1627; notable as one of his most touching discourses.

In the embankment gardens we have passed a statue recently placed there; a man seated in a chair, uncouth of figure, with bent brow and rugged face.  And in the wall of the corner house behind we stop to look at a small memorial tablet, still more recently placed; a medallion portrait of the same face, and beneath, this inscription: “Thomas Carlyle lived at 24, Cheyne Row, 1834–81.”  For this is not the house in which he lived, and the tablet was fixed on this one with queer common sense, his own being in Chancery at that time!  It is to be found farther up in this little dull street running from Cheyne Walk just here; in which there is nothing that is not commonplace, save the little cottage covered with vines, in the wall above which is a stone with odd old-fashioned lettering—“This is Gt. Cheyne Row, 1708.”  About the middle of the row of small dreary brick houses, the one once numbered 5, now 24, is that in which he dwelt for nearly fifty years, and wherein he wrote his commination service large on all mankind; talking more eloquently, and more loquaciously withal, in praise of silence, than any man who ever scolded all through life that he might do honour to the strong arm and the still tongue!

The look-out across the narrow street from his front windows—“mainly into trees,” he wrote to Sir William Hamilton, on moving here—shows now nothing but a long, low, depressing wall, above which rises a many-windowed model dwelling-house; and it is surely one of the least inspiring prospects in all London: while from the back he could see nothing of interest except the westernmost end of the old wall of Henry VIII.’s Manor House garden, which still stands here.  It gave him a hint in his pamphlet, “Shooting Niagara;” wherein, sneering at modern bricks and bricklayers, he says: “Bricks, burn them rightly, build them faithfully with mortar faithfully tempered, they will stand. . . .  We have them here at the head of this garden, which are in their third or fourth century.”

Long before his day, there had lived, almost on this same spot, another “Hermit of Chelsea,” in the person of Dr. Tobias Smollett; who came here to live in retirement in 1750, fresh from the fame of his “Roderick Random;” seeking such seclusion partly on account of his daughter’s health and his own, and partly for the sake of his work.  Here he wrote “Ferdinand Count Fathom,” finished Hume’s “History of England,” and began his translation of “Don Quixote;” and here took place those Sunday dinners, the delicious description of which, and of the guests, he has put into the mouth of young Jerry Melford, in “Humphrey Clinker.”  Here were spent some of his happiest days, with his work and with his friends from town; Johnson, Garrick, Sterne, John Wilkes, John Hunter: the latter probably coming from Earl’s Court, Kensington, where his place—mansion, museum, and menagerie in one—stood till very lately.  Smollett was as well known in the streets of Chelsea, in his day, as Carlyle in ours—“a good-sized, strongly-made man, graceful, dignified, and pleasant.”

It was a fine old place, with extensive grounds, which Smollett took; being the ancient Manor House of the Lawrences, once owned by Henry VIII., as we have seen.  The house stood exactly on the site of this block of two-storied brick cottages called “Little Cheyne Row,” between Great Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street.  Its early history has little that need detain us, until, in 1714, it came to be called Monmouth House, from its new owner, the Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch; who came here with John Gay as her domestic steward or secretary, and who here lived to the age of ninety.  She had been an ornament of Charles II.’s court, a real jewel amidst all the pinchbeck and paste of his setting.  She was the widow of his son, the hapless Duke of Monmouth; “who began life with no legal right to his being, and ended it by forfeiting all similar right to his head.”  It is to this gracious and gentle chatelaine that Sir Walter Scott sings his “Lay of the Last Minstrel”:

Smollett left the place for ever, in 1769, and a little later, went to die in Spain; a brave, silent, sad man, for all the fun in his books, and already broken in health by the untimely death of his daughter.  The Chelsea historian, Faulkner, writing in 1829, says that Monmouth House was then “a melancholy scene of desolation and ruin.”  It was finally torn down and carted away in 1834.

The grounds of Monmouth House—now built over by a great board-school—stretched back to those of the Rectory of St. Luke’s, a step to the northward.  The Rectory is an irregular brick building, delightful to the eye, set in an old-fashioned lawn with great trees; its tranquillity assured by a high brick wall.  It is a very old house, was built by the Marquis of Winchester, and granted by him to the parish on May 6th, 1566, at the request of Queen Elizabeth.  Glebe Place, just at hand, shows the site of the glebe land given in her time, in exchange for the older parsonage, which stood still farther west, behind Millman’s Row, now Millman’s Street.

The historic interest of this Chelsea Rectory, however, is dwarfed by its personal appeal to all of us, for that it was the home of three notable boys; named, in the order of their ages, Charles, George, and Henry Kingsley.  They came here in the year 1836; their father, the Rev. Charles Kingsley, having received the living of St. Luke’s, Chelsea, from Lord Cadogan.  So their beloved west-country life was exchanged for the prim, parochial prosiness, which made such a doleful difference to them all.  For these boys were born, it seems to me, with the instant love of life and movement in their blood.  Charles has shown it in almost everything he wrote; Henry gave utterance to it in his books only in a less degree, because it found vent in his years of wandering; while George—better known as “The Doctor”—appears for a little while at spasmodic intervals at his home on Highgate Hill, then plunges into space again, and is vaguely heard of, now yachting in the South Seas, now chatting delightfully in a Colorado mining-camp.  Henry, the youngest, was a sensitive, shy lad, delicate in health; and the old dames in this neighbourhood tell of his quiet manner and modest bearing.  Many of the poor old women about here have a vivid remembrance of “the boys,” and speak of the whole family with respect and affection.  Henry was born in 1830, studied at King’s College, London, for a little over two years, 1844–6; his name was entered at Worcester College, Oxford, March 6th, 1850; where he kept ten terms, leaving at Easter, 1853, without taking his degree.  The Australian “gold-digging fever” was then raging, and he started for that country with two friends.  There he did all sorts of things: tried mining, tried herding, became a stockman, was in the mounted police; and after about five years of these varied vocations, returned to England with no gold in his pockets.  It was all in his brain; a precious possession of experience of life and of men, to be coined into the characters and the scenes which have passed current all over the globe.  All his Australian stories are admirable, and “Geoffrey Hamlyn”—his first work, produced soon after his return, in 1859—is the best tale of colonial life ever written.  His parents had intended that he should take holy orders, hoping perhaps that he should succeed his father in the living of old St. Luke’s; but he felt himself utterly unfitted for this profession, as he also, although with less reason, believed himself unfitted for that of the journalist.  This latter he tried for a while when he came back to England; and indeed, as a correspondent he displayed dash enough, and after the surrender of Sedan, was the first man to enter within the French lines.  He found at length his proper place as an essayist and a novelist.  In all his works, there is to me a strange and nameless charm—a quaint humour, a genuine sentiment, an atmosphere all his own, breezy, buoyant, boyish; seeming to show a personality behind all his creations—that of their creator—a fair, frank, fresh-hearted man.  He had true artistic talent in another direction, too, inherited from his grandfather; and he may have been just in judging himself capable of gaining far greater reputation as a painter than as a novelist, even.  His skill in drawing was amazing, and the few water-colours and oils left to his family—and unknown outside of its members—are masterpieces.  On his return from Australia, he lived for a while with his mother at “The Cottage,” at Eversleigh; never caring for Chelsea after the death of his father.  He was married in 1864 by Charles Kingsley and Gerald Blunt, the present Rector of Chelsea.  On May 24th, 1876, “on the vigil of the Ascension,” only forty-six years of age, he died at Cuckfield, Sussex, which quiet retreat he had chosen twelve months before.

Henry Kingsley especially appeals to us, just here, for that he has given us, in “The Hillyars and Burtons,” so vivid a picture of modern Chelsea—its streets and by-ways, its old houses and its venerable church, in delightful detail, as he saw them when a boy.  The Hillyar family is a romantic reproduction of that ancient Chelsea family, the Lawrences; in “The Burtons” he gives us his reminiscence of the Wyatt household, living at Wargrave, Henley-on-Thames.  The brave girl, Emma Burton, is a portrait of Emma Wyatt.  The old home of the Burtons—“the very large house which stood by itself, as it were, fronting the buildings opposite our forge; which contained twenty-five rooms, some of them very large, and which was called by us, indifferently, Church Place, or Queen Elizabeth’s Place”—this was the only one of the grand mansions just here in Chelsea left standing when the Kingsleys came here.  “It had been in reality the palace of the young Earl of Essex; a very large three-storied house of old brick, with stone-mullioned windows and doorways.”  You may see a print of it in “kind old Mr. Faulkner’s” book, as he found it in 1830, dilapidated then, and let out to many tenants.  Later, it sunk lower still; and finally the grand old fabric—“which had been trodden often enough by the statesmen and dandies of Queen Elizabeth’s court, and most certainly by that mighty woman herself”—was demolished between 1840–42.  The boy of ten or twelve then, Henry Kingsley, must have had the same feelings of wonder and regret, which he puts into the speech of Jim Burton, as he looked on this historic pile, roofless, dis-windowed, pickaxed to pieces.  He is not quite correct in letting Jim Burton fix its site on the south side of Paultons Square; it stood between that square and Church Street, exactly where now stands a block of poor little one-storied houses, “Paulton Terrace, 1843,” painted on its pediment; and at the back, built in with some still more wretched little dwellings, you shall still see part of the palace wall of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the son of the Putney blacksmith.

From this ancient site I often walk, in company with the Burton brothers, Joe and Jim, their sister Emma and Erne Hillyar behind, down old Church Lane, now Church Street, haunted by historic shades, to where, at its foot, stands “Chelsea Old Church.”

“Four hundred years of memory are crowded into that dark old church, and the great flood of change beats round the walls, and shakes the door in vain, but never enters.  The dead stand thick together there, as if to make a brave resistance to the moving world outside, which jars upon their slumber.  It is a church of the dead.  I cannot fancy any one being married in that church—its air would chill the boldest bride that ever walked to the altar.”  So Joe Burton well says, sitting in his “old place”—the bench which stood in front of Sir Thomas More’s monument, close to the altar-rails.  But for all that, it is not a depressing but rather a delightful old church, if you sit here of a summer afternoon; the sun streaming in from the south-west, slanting on the stone effigies, and the breeze breathing in through the little door beside More’s monument, shaking the grass outside, and the noble river sparkling beyond the embankment garden.  To me it has more of fascination than any church in London.  Its entire absence of architectural effect in its varying styles; its retention to this day of the simplicity of the village church, even as when built; its many monuments and mural tablets, each one a page of English history; its family escutcheons; its tattered battle flags hung above; the living memories that are built in with every dead stone: all these combine to make it the quaintest, the most impressive, the most lovable of churches.  Dean Stanley was fond of calling it one of the Chapters of his Abbey.  This is not the place for a description of the monuments, nor for details of their inscriptions; which make us think, as they did the boy Jim Burton, that these buried here “were the best people who ever lived.”  Only the tenant of one plain stone coffin is modest in his simple request cut thereon: “Of your Charitie pray for the soul of Edmund Bray, Knight.”  As for most of the others, I quite agree with Jim, that the Latin, in which their long epitaphs are written, was the only language appropriate; the English tongue being “utterly unfit to express the various virtues of these wonderful Chelsea people;” among whom, it strikes me, too, that “Sir Thomas More was the most obstinately determined that posterity should hear his own account of himself.”  His black marble slab, set deep under a plain grey Gothic arch, is placed on the chancel wall, just where he used to stand in his “surplisse;” above it is his punning crest, a Moor’s head on a shield; and on it is cut his own long Latin inscription, sent by him to his friend Erasmus, who thought it worth printing in his collection of “Tracts and Letters” (Antwerp, 1534).  Twice have the characters been recut; and each time has care been taken, for his memory’s sake, to leave blank the last word of the line, which describes him as “troublesome to thieves, murderers and heretics.”  To the sturdy old Catholic these were all equal—all criminals to be put out of the way.  The irony of chance has placed, on the wall close beside his tomb, a tablet which keeps alive the name of one of the Tyndale family, a descendant of that one whose books More burnt, and whose body he would probably have liked to burn, also!  More’s two wives are buried here, as well as others of his family; but whether his body lies here, or in a Tower grave, no one knows.

Three of Chelsea’s grandest ladies lie under monuments in the church.  Lady Dacre, with her husband Gregory—“their dogs at their feet”—rests under a Gothic canopy, richly wrought with flowers; tomb and canopy all of superb white marble.  Its sumptuousness is all the more striking in that it contrasts so strongly with the simplicity ordered by her dying injunctions, as she wrote them on December 20, 1594, when decreeing the establishment of her almshouses—venerable cottages still standing in Tothill Street, Westminster, not far from the little street named for her.  In her will she says: “And I earnestly desire that I may be buried in one tombe with my lord at Chelsey, without all earthlie pompe, but with some privat freindes, and nott to be ripped, and towling for me, but no ringing, after service ys done.”

And now, glancing about at the monumental marble and brass of these soldiers, statesmen, citizens, simple and stately, we are ready to agree with straight-thinking Jim Burton: “But, on the whole, give me the Hillyars, kneeling humbly, with nothing to say for themselves.”  It is the Lawrence family, as I have explained, who are called “The Hillyars” by Henry Kingsley; and his preference—a memory, no doubt, of the Sunday visits of his boyhood to the rector’s pew, which directly faces these tombs—refers to that quaint monument in the Lawrence chapel; where, under a little arch, supported by columns, kneel wife and husband face to face, he in his armour, his three simple-seeming sons in ruffs kneeling behind him; she in her heavy stiff dress, her six daughters on their knees behind in a dutiful row, decreasing in size to the two dead while yet babies on the cushion before her.  Says Jim: “I gave them names in my own head.  I loved two of them.  On the female side I loved the little wee child, for whom there was very small room, and who was crowded against the pillar, kneeling on the skirts of the last of her big sisters.  And I loved the big lad, who knelt directly behind his father; between the Knight himself and the two little brothers, dressed so very like blue-coat boys, such quaint little fellows as they were.”

Before going out through the main door we stop to look at the wooden rack to which the old books are chained, and underneath, at the little mahogany shelf, for convenience in reading them: these bring back to us the monkish days.  Here is the Bible, kept since that time when it was so costly a volume; here the Prayer-book, the Church Homilies, Foxe’s Martyrology: this latter then nearly as sacred as the Scriptures.  In the porch now stands the bell which hung for nearly two hundred years in the tower, given to the church by “the Honourable William Ashburnham, Esquire, Cofferer to His Majesty’s Household, 1679;” so its lettering tells us.

Going, one foggy night of that winter, perhaps from that Ashburnham House of which we have seen the site, he lost his way, slipped, and fell into the river; and would have been lost, good swimmer though he was, unable to see the shore, but that he heard this church clock strike nine, and so guided, swam safely toward it.  He gave to the church, just then being rebuilt with Lady Cheyne’s funds, this bell, with a sum sufficient to have it rung for five minutes every night at nine.  So was done for many years—the ringer receiving “a penny each night and a penny for his candle”—until about half a century ago the fund vanished, somehow, somewhere; and this bell has never been rung since!

Outside, the tiny graveyard is crowded with slabs and monuments, many of them ugly, some curious, a few fine: from the stately stone tomb of Sir Hans Sloane and his wife—a marble urn entwisted with Æsculapian serpents, under a marble canopy—to the simple slab, worn with wind and weather, of Dr. Chamberlayne and his family; of whom the daughter, Anne, more famous than any of the others, “long declining wedlock, and aspiring above her sex and age, fought under her brother with arms and manly attire, in a fire-ship against the French, on the 30th June, 1690: a maiden heroine!”  This “Casta Virago” was then but twenty-three, and did not grow in courage with her years; for she soon after consented to marry one John Spraggs, and then died!  Here and there, amid unknown graves, we may find those of Magdalen Herbert; Mrs. Fletcher, wife of the Bishop of London, mother of the Fletcher of the famous firm “Beaumont and Fletcher”; Shadwell, the poet-laureate; Woodfall, the publisher of “Junius”; Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate of Bow Street, half-brother of the novelist.

Amid these English names is written the name of an historic Frenchman; and his historic grave is hid somewhere in a corner of this churchyard, past finding out. [160]  The church record reads: “Burial—A.D. 1740, May 18, Brigadier John Cavallier”; and this dry detail of the interment of “only an old officer, who had always behaved very bravely,” is all that is told there of Jean Antoine Cavallier, the Camissard, the leader of the French Huguenots in their long, fierce fight against the cruel and lawless enforcement of Louis XIV.’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; refusing to be apostatized, expatriated, or exterminated.  They became the Covenanters of France, and Cavallier—a baker’s apprentice, with a genuine genius for war, the soul of the strife, elected their leader before he was twenty—was their Black Douglas: one even more furious and more ferocious.  After fire and slaughter and pillage for two years; affronting the daylight, blazing up the night; amazing the whole world and horrifying their enemies; banded like bandits in the hills of Le Puy, singly like guerillas along the range of the Cevennes; praying, prophesying, slaying:—they were in the end circled about by the Grand Monarque’s soldiery under Villars, shut out from Dutch and English aid, from escape by sea, forced to capitulate.  Cavallier was let go to Jersey, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the island, and finally closed his stormy career peacefully in London.  Here he lies, in an unknown grave, in this alien soil; and the Cévenols, up in their hills, still talk of him and of his war two hundred years ago, to-day as if it were yesterday.

As we stand here, the broad embankment, with its dainty gardens, stretches between us and the river; spanned just above by old Battersea Bridge, the only wooden bridge left to the Thames, since that of Putney has gone.  For centuries there had been a ferry just here, granted by James I. to some of his “dear relations” for £40.  In 1771 this bridge was built for foot-passengers only, was enlarged later, and is soon to be pulled down; its rude and reverend timbers are already propped up here and there.  Stand midway on it with me, while the ceaseless stream of men flows by, caring nothing for that at which you and I are looking.

On our right, along the southern shore, stretches Battersea Park, fringed with its great masses of cool foliage; where not long ago were marshes and meadows, and the barren, bleak, Battersea Fields.  In those fields was fought the famous duel in 1829, between the Duke of Wellington and Lord Winchelsea.  And long before that, in the reeds along that shore was hid Colonel Blood, intending to shoot Charles II. while bathing, as was the King’s custom, “in the Thames over against Chelsey; but his arm was checked by an awe of Majesty.”  So, at least, Blood had the impudence to narrate, when on his trial for his audacious and almost successful attempt to steal the royal regalia from the Tower in May, 1671.  Whether the King was touched by the narrative, or whether, as has been hinted, his impecunious Majesty was implicated in the plot to rob the crown; it is certain that he pardoned the daring adventurer, and gave him a yearly pension of £500.

Beyond the Bridge, back of us, rises the square, squat tower of St. Mary’s, Battersea, builded in the worst churchwarden style; and otherwise only notable for that therein was married Blake the madman; that there Turner loved to sit at the vestry window and sketch; and that there lie the remains and stand the magnificent monument of St. John Bolingbroke, and of his second wife, niece of Madame de Maintenon: both their epitaphs written by him.  Not far from the church, on the river bank next to the mill, still stands one wing of the great seventy-roomed Bolingbroke House; in which St. John was born, to which he returned from his stormy exile, there to pass his remaining days in study, and there to die.  Through its many old-time chambers with the famous “sprawling Verrio’s” ceiling paintings, I will lead you into the historic cedar-room, on the river front—Bolingbroke’s favourite retreat, whose four walls, panelled with cedar from floor to ceiling, are still as redolent as when Pope—Bolingbroke’s guest—began in it his “Essay on Man,” inspired thereto by his host; whose wit, scholarship, philosophy had, during his exile, inspired also Voltaire and made him own his master.  Here in this room were wont to meet Bolingbroke and Pope, Chesterfield and Swift—that brilliant quartette who hated, plotted against, and attacked Walpole.  His house—Sir Robert’s—forms part of the great mass of Chelsea Hospital, dim in the distance before us; between, stretches the old Dutch front of Cheyne Walk, near at hand resolving itself into most ancient houses, with quaint windows in their sloping roofs; their red tiles and chocolate-brown bricks showing dark behind the green of the old lime-trees.  The setting sun lingers lovingly on the square church tower, venerable with the mellow tints of time; and presently the moon comes up, washing out all these tints, except that of the white wall-tablets; and from out the grey mass shines the clock-face, even now striking nine, as it did for the “Hon. William,” just then soused in the river, more than two hundred years ago.  Farther beyond the bridge are two buildings, which also bring the old and the new close together; the “World’s End Tavern,” at the end of the passage of that name, famous three centuries ago as a rendezvous for improper pleasure parties, and introduced in Congreve’s “Love for Love,” in that connection.  Just west of the sedate little “public,” “The Aquatic Stores,” are two tiny houses set back from the embankment; stone steps lead down to their minute front gardens; vines clamber up the front of the westernmost house to an iron balcony on its roof.  That balcony was put there for his own convenience by Joseph Mallord William Turner, the painter; in that house, No. 119, Cheyne Walk, he lived for many years, and in that front room he died, on the 18th December, 1851.  To that upper window, no longer able to paint, too feeble to walk, he was wheeled every morning during his last days that he might lose no light of the winter sun on his beloved Thames.  In Battersea Church you may sit in the little vestry window wherein he was wont to sketch.  The story of his escape from his grand and gloomy mansion in Queen Anne Street, is well known; he never returned to it, but made his home here with the burly Mrs. Booth.  After long hunting, his aged housekeeper, in company with another decrepid dame, found him in hiding, only the day before his death.  The barber’s son of Maiden Lane lies in the great cathedral of St. Paul’s, and the evil that he did is buried with him—his eccentricity, his madness if you will—but he lives for all time, as the greatest landscape painter England has known.

The long summer afternoon is waning, and the western sky, flaming with fading fires, floods broad Chelsea Reach with waves of dusky gold.  The evening mist rises slowly, as yet hiding nothing, but transforming even commonplace objects in a weird unwonted way.  Those pretentious blocks of new mansions loom almost lordly now; that distant railway bridge is only a ghost of graceful glimmering arches; money-making factory chimneys and commercial wharves pretend to picturesque possibilities; clumpish barges, sprawling on the mud, are no longer ugly; and a broad-bottomed coasting schooner, unloading stone at a dock, is just what we would choose to see there.  And here at the end of this bridge is a fragment of “real old Chelsea,” left intact for our delectation—a cluster of drooping trees on the bank, an unaccountable boat-house, stone steps leading down to the bit of beach, whereon are skiffs drawn up, and cordage lying about, and sail-wrapped spars.  Out on the placid Reach there is but little movement; the river steamboats are anchored in a dark mass near the shore, and the last belated one edges up to its mooring beside them for the night; a burly barge drifts slowly by under its dusky brown sails, or a “dumb-barge” floats with the tide, its crew of one man busied with his long sculls and his not-dumb blasphemy; a puffing tug with a red light in its nose drags tortuously a long line of tarpaulin-covered canal boats.  As each of these moving objects breaks the burnished waves into bits of golden gloom, the whole still surface of the stream becomes alive for us with a fairy flotilla, born of the brain, yet real enough to our vision.  There float ancient barges, six and eight-oared, gorgeous with gilding or severely simple; those of brilliant noblemen, of the City guilds, of Royalty itself.  We seem to see Henry VIII. rowing up, on a visit to More; Elizabeth coming to call on Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, him who scattered the “Spanyard’s Invinsable Navye” for her; the first Charles, impatient to dote on his “dear Steenie.”  Even the commonest of these curious craft is freighted, for our fancy, with a nameless cargo, not on its bills of lading.  So do we gaze across the river of Time that flows between us and the group of famous men and historic women, moving in the twilight of the past on Chelsea’s shore.  And we ask, with Marcus Piso, friend of the younger Cicero: “Is it by some mutual instinct, or through some delusion, that when we see the very spots where famous men have lived, we are far more touched than when we hear of the things that they have done, or read something that they have written?  It is thus that I am affected at this moment.”

Here walks Sir Thomas More with his wife and daughters; here George Herbert muses “with a far look in his immortal eyes;” here come Donne and Isaac Walton to visit his mother, Magdalen Herbert.  Swift strolls here, alone as he likes best; he has been looking at the hay-makers, just inshore above, in the hot summer day, and is about to bathe in the river—the “more than Oriental scrupulosity” of his bodily care contrasting so keenly with his fondness for moral filth.  Here come his friend Atterbury, the learned theologian, from his great garden in Church Lane; and Dr. Arbuthnott, Queen Anne’s famous physician; and another noted doctor, Sir John Shadwell, father of the poet laureate.  Locke leaves the summer-house in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s garden, just above where now is St. George’s Workhouse: he has just begun his great essay, while living here as tutor for the son.  Pym, Charles’ enemy, who lives on the waterside, stops to look at learned Sir Joseph Banks, who, after a stormy voyage around the world with Captain Cook, now tranquilly sits fishing here; Samuel Johnson strides buoyantly by to his china-making or plods pensively back, downcast with his failure; Hans Sloane walks arm-in-arm with his friend Sir Isaac Newton, who has come out here from his house in Leicester Square; behind them saunter Addison and Dick Steele, and a more queerly-consorted couple, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Carlyle.  St. Evremonde goes with one strangely resembling him superficially—Leigh Hunt, who lived at the present No. 10, Upper Cheyne Row; and who, “with his delicate, worn, but keenly intellectual face, his large luminous eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, looks like an old French abbé.”  Shelley is near them, having come a long way from his lodgings in Hans Place; where he has for a neighbour a certain Joseph Balsamo, calling himself the Count Cagliostro, living in Sloane Street.  The Dandy D’Orsay cautiously threads his way, for he is in hiding from his creditors.  Turner passes, gazing on his river; and Maclise, who lives here on the bank and dies here too, painting the Thames.  Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his near neighbour George Eliot go by; and, last of all, Henry Kingsley with the boy Joe Burton, whom he loves, and whom we love, too.

The puffing tug shrieks, and puts to flight these vagrant fancies of an American, sentimentalizing in Chelsea; and so ends his stroll, his returning footsteps echoing the words of Goethe, and reminding him that, after all, “You find in Rome only what you take there.”

THE END.

INDEX.

Abbey, Westminster, 33, 152

“Absalom and Achitophel,” 50

Addison, Joseph, 23, 63, 65, 66, 80, 94, 122, 178

Albert Suspension Bridge, 131

“Alcyon,” 63

Alma, Battle of the, 73

Almshouses, Lady Dacre’s, 155

Anne, Queen, 105, 119, 177

Apsley House, 13

Aquatic Shores, 169

Arbuthnot, Dr., 177

Armada, 53, 174

Armida, 91

Aschyly, Katherine, 116

Ashburnham, Hon. Wm., 158, 166

„ House, 63, 158

Ashe, Miss, 79

Aspasia, 93

Astell, Mary, 93

Atterbury, 177

Aubrey, John, 38

Augustine, 47

Australia, 147, 148