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.