A Literary Pilgrimage Among the Haunts of Famous British Authors. Theodore F. Wolfe
the statue of Carlyle; behind it is the dull little lane of Cheyne Row, whose quiet Carlyle thought "hardly inferior to Craigenputtock," and here at No. 5, later 24, a plain three-storied house of sullied brick—even more dingy than its neighbors—the pessimistic sage lived,Carlyle's House wrote, and scolded for half a century. All the wainscoted rooms are sombre and cheerless, but the memory-haunted study seems most depressing as we stand at Carlyle's hearth-stone and look upon the spot where he sat to write his many books. The garden was a pleasanter place, with bright flowers his wife planted, and the tree under which he loved to smoke and chat. Here Tennyson lounged with him, devoted to a long pipe and longer discourse; here Froude oft found him on the daily visits which enabled him to picture the seer, "warts and all;" here Dickens, Maclise, and Hunt saw him at his best, and here the latter wrote "Jenny Kissed Me,"—Jenny being Mrs. Carlyle. To Carlyle in this sombre home came Emerson, Ruskin, Tyndal, and a host of friends and disciples from all lands, and hither will come an endless procession of admirers, for many Carlyle belongings have been recovered, and the place is to be preserved as a memorial of the stern philosopher. Around the corner Hunt lived, in the curious little house Carlyle described, and here he studied and wrote in the upper front room. On the next block of the same street stood the home of Smollett,Smollett which was removed the year that Carlyle came to dwell in the vicinage. It was a spacious mansion which had been the Lawrence manor-house. Smollett wrote here "Count Fathom," "Clinker," and "Launcelot Greaves," and finished Hume's "England." Here Garrick, Johnson, Sterne, and other starry spirits were his guests, and here later lived the poet GayGay and wrote "The Shepherd's Week," "Rural Sports," and part of his comedies. In the cellars of some of the houses at the top of Lawrence Street may be seen remains of the ovens of the once famous Chelsea china-factory, where Dr. Johnson wrought for some time vainly trying to master the art of china-making—his pieces always cracking in the oven: a service of china presented to him by the factorymen here was preserved in Holland House. A tasteful Queen Anne mansion with beautiful interior decorations, not far from the Carlyle house, was a domicile of the poet and æsthete Oscar Wilde. In the picturesque rectory of St. Luke's, a few rods north from Cheyne Row, the author of "Hypatia" and his scarcely less famed brother Henry, of "Ravenshoe," lived as boys, their father being the incumbent of the parish. Henry KingsleyKingsley presents, in his "Hillyars and Burtons," charming sketches of Chelsea as it existed in his boyhood. Overlooking the river at the foot of the adjoining street, we find Chelsea Church, one of the most curious and interesting of London's many fanes, albeit partially disfigured by modern changes. In its pulpit Donne, the poet-divine, preached at the funeral of the mother of George Herbert;Herbert at its altar the dramatist Colman was married. Among its many monuments we find the mural tablet of Sir Thomas More, a marble slab with an inscription by himself which formerly described him as "harassing to thieves, murderers, and heretics." Here lie the ancestors of the poet Sidney, and in the little church-yard are the graves of Shadwell the laureate, who died just back of the church, of the publisher of "Junius," and of a brother of Fielding. Leading back from the river here is Church Street, on which dwelt Swift, Atterbury, and Arbuthnot, while Steele had a little house near by. The next street is named for Sir John Danvers, whose house was at the top of the little street: his wife was the mother of the poet Herbert, who dwelt here for a time and wrote some of his earlier poems; Donne and the amiable angler Izaak Walton were frequent guests of Herbert's mother in this place. The adjacent street marks the place of Beaufort House, the palatial residence of Sir Thomas More, where he was visited by his much-married monarch; where the learned and colloquial author of "Encomium Moriæ," Erasmus, was sometime an inmate; and where, decades later, Thomas Sackville, Earl Dorset,Dorset wrote the earliest English tragedy, "Gorboduc." A time-worn structure between King's Road and the Thames was once the home of the bewitching Nell Gwynne, and in later years "became (not inappropriately) a gin-temple," as Carlyle said: this old edifice was also sometime occupied by Addison. Back of King's Road we find the venerable ShaftesburyShaftesbury House—in which the famous earl wrote "Characteristics," Locke began his "Essay," and Addison produced some of his Spectator papers—long transformed into a workhouse, in the grounds of which we are shown the place of "Locke's yew," recently removed. The Old World's End Tavern, by Riley Street, was the notorious resort of Congreve's "Love for Love;" the once ill-famed Cremorne Gardens, just beyond, were erst part of the estate of a granddaughter of William Penn, who was related to the Penns of Stoke-Pogis, where Gray wrote the "Elegy." A near-by little ivy-grown brick house, with wide windows in its front and an iron balcony upon its roof, was long the home of Turner, and in the upper room, through whose arched window he could look out upon the river, he died. From the water-edge here we see, upon the opposite shore, the old church where Blake was married and Bolingbroke was buried, and from whose vestry window Turner made his favorite sketches; near by is a portion of the ancient house where BolingbrokeBolingbroke was born and died, where he entertained such guests as Chesterfield, Swift, and Pope, and where the latter wrote part of the "Essay on Man." Beyond Chelsea we find at Fulham the spot where lived and died Richardson, who is said to have written "Clarissa Harlowe" here; and, near the river, the place of the home of Hook, and his mural tablet in the old church by which he lies, near the grave of the poet Vincent Bourne. Our ramble by Thames-side may be pleasantly prolonged through a region rife with the associations we esteem most precious. Our way lies among the sometime haunts of Cowley, Bulwer, Pepys, Thomson, Marryat, Pope, Hogarth, Tennyson, Fielding, "Junius," Garrick, and many another shining one. Some of lesser genius dwell now incarnate in this memory-haunted district by the river-side—the radical Labouchère, living in Pope's famous villa, Stephens, and the author of "Aurora Floyd,"—but it is the memory of the mighty dead that impresses us as we saunter amid the scenes they loved and which inspired or witnessed the work for which the world gives them honor and homage; we find their accustomed resorts, the rural habitations where many of them dwelt and died, the dim church aisles or the turf-grown graves where they are laid at last in the dreamless sleep whose waking we may not know.
THE SCENE OF GRAY'S ELEGY
The Country Church-Yard—Tomb of Gray—Stoke-Pogis Church—Reverie and Reminiscence—Scenes of Milton—Waller—Porter—Coke—Denham.
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