CHELSEA AND THE RIVER

Beautiful Chelsea Turner's Last Days St. Luke's Church Street Cheyne Row's Philosopher The Carlyles and an Intrusion Don Saltero's The Publican and the Museum Rossetti's breakfast The Physick Garden The Royal Hospital The Pensioners' coats London's disregard of its river The Gulls Speed Whistler and the Thames again The National Gallery of British Art "Every picture tells a Story" Old Favourites Great English Painters The New Turners Watts and Millais The Chantrey Bequest A Sea-piece Lambeth Palace.

Old riverside Chelsea has not allowed progress to injure it essentially. Although huge blocks of flats have arisen, and Rossetti's house at No. 16 Cheyne Walk has been rebuilt and refaced, and some very strange architectural freaks may be observed in the neighbourhood of No. 73 (fantastic challenges to the good taste of the older houses in the Walk), the Embankment still retains much of its old character and charm. London has no more attractive sight than Cheyne Walk in Spring, when the leaves are a tender green and through them you see the grave red bricks and white window frames of these Anne and Georgian houses, as satisfactory and restful as those of the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam.

The Walk has had famous inhabitants. To the far western end (at No. 119) Turner retreated in his old age; and here he lived alone as Mr. Booth or, as the neighbours called him, Admiral Booth, deeming him a retired sailor hoping never to be found by his friends again, and it is here that, huddled in a dressing-gown, he would climb to the roof at day-break to watch the sun rise. And here he died in 1851, aged nearly eighty. Sir Thomas More, whose house stood where Beaufort Row now is to the west of Battersea Bridge still lends his name to the neighbourhood; while his body rests in Chelsea Old Church, as St. Luke's is called a grave solid building of red brick and stone, with a noble square tower on which a sun-dial and a clock dwell side by side, not perhaps in perfect agreement but certainly in amity. More's wife Joan is also buried here; and here lie the mother of Fletcher the dramatist, and the mother of George Herbert the divine poet, whose funeral sermon was preached in the church by Dr. Donne, and listened to by the biographer both of her son and of her celebrant Izaak Walton.

Lindsey House, to the west, was Whistler's home for many years ; and you find another of his homes that built for him by Godwin in Tite Street, a little way up on the right, the White House with a very charming window on the river end. Opposite is Chelsea Lodge, where his compatriot, E. A. Abbey, worked and died. Higher up on the same side is a,very nest of artistic activity, Tower House, where John Sargent has wielded his mighty brush.

At the corner of Danvers Street and Cheyne Walk the eye is startled by finding a medieval facade. This is Crosby Hall, which once stood in Bishopsgate Street, but was taken down and re-erected here with great piety. It was built in 1475 and transferred here in 1908.

Church Street, Chelsea, should be explored by any one who is interested in quaint small houses, beginning with a fine piece of square Anne work in the shape of a free school that appears now to be deserted and decaying. Swift, Steele, Arbuthnot, Atterbury and, many years later, both Charles and Henry Kingsley, all lived in Church Street for a while.

Cheyne Row, close by on the east, is made famous by the house No. 5 in which Carlyle lived from 1834 until 1881, there writing his "French Revolution" and "Frederick the Great," and there smoking with Tennyson and FitzGerald. Private piety has preserved this house as a place of pilgrimage. It is certainly very interesting to see the double-walled study where the philosopher wrote, and to realise that it was by this kitchen fire that he sat with Tennyson; to look over his books and peer at his pipes and letters and portraits ; and yet I had a feeling of indiscretion the while. If there is any man's wash-handstand and bath, any woman's bed and chair, that I feel there is no need for me or the public generally to see, they are Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle's. I seemed to hear both of them distilling suitable epithets. It is not as if one could read the books or examine the letters: everything is under lock and key. There the house is, however, exactly as it was left, and better a thousand times that it should be a show for the curious than that it should be pulled down. And, at any rate, it contains Carlyle's death mask and a cast of his hands, after death very characteristic hands ; and his walking stick is on the wall.

The famous Don Saltero's Museum was at 18, Cheyne Walk. It is now no more; and where are its curiosities? Where? Saltero was one Salter, a barber, who opened a coffee house here in 1695 and relied on his collection of oddities to draw custom. It was a sound device and should be followed. (All innkeepers should display a few curiosities, and indeed a few do. I know of one at Feltham in Sussex, and another in Camden Town ; while it was in an East Grinstead hostel that I saw Dr. Johnson's chair from the Essex Head. Henekey's, by Gray's Inn, has an old lantern or so. But the innkeeper, is not as a rule alive to his opportunities.) At the end of the eighteenth century Don Saltero's collection was dispersed. Chelsea in those days was famous also for its buns and its china. It makes neither now. Why is it that these industries decay? Why is it that one seems to be always too late?

It was at No. 16 Cheyne Walk that Rossetti lived, and it was here that Mr. Meredith was to have joined him, and would have done so but for that dreadful vision, on a bright May morning at noon, of the poet's breakfast rashers cold and stiff, and two poached eggs "slowly bleeding to death" on them. In the garden at the back Rossetti kept his wild beasts. At No. 4 died Daniel Maclise, and, later, George Eliot. Passing the row of wealthy houses of which old Swan House and Clock House are the most desirable, we come to the Botanic Garden of the Royal Society of Apothecaries, with its trim walks and bewigged statue of Sir Hans Sloane in the midst. Here Linn us himself once strolled; but we cannot do the same, for the Physick Garden, as it used to be called, is private: yet one may peep through its gate in Swan Walk for another view of it Swan Walk, whose square houses of an earlier day are among the most attractive in London.