RICHMOND BRIDGE.
[CHAPTER IX.]
RICHMOND TO BATTERSEA.
The River at Richmond—A Spot for a Holiday—The Old Palace of Sheen—The Trumpeters’ House—Old Sad Memories—Richmond Green—The Church—Kean’s Grave—Water Supply—The Bridge—The Nunnery of Sion and Convent of Sheen—Sir William Temple—Kew Observatory, Isleworth—Sion House and its History—Kew Palace and the Georges—Kew Gardens—Kew Green—Brentford—Mortlake—Barnes—Chiswick—The Boat-race—Hammersmith—Putney—Barn Elms—Putney and Fulham—The Bishops of London—Hurlingham—The Approach to a Great City.
IT would be easy to find spots on the Thames where the natural features—the wood-clad slope, the grassy sward, and the gliding stream—were associated in equal beauty, but it would be difficult to meet with any more picturesque combination of these with the dwellings of men than may be seen on the river reach just below Richmond Bridge. The light-grey arches, through which the Thames flows ripplingly, are backed by the groves of Richmond Hill. On the one hand are the shady gardens and villas that now thickly stud the meadow plain of Twickenham; on the other, the houses of the town, after thronging down to the waterside at the entrance of the bridge, give place to statelier mansions with ample pleasure-grounds. It was doubtless a more imposing sight when the façade of the old palace of Sheen, which these mansions have replaced, overlooked the margin of the Thames; but it can have hardly been more picturesque than now. The low iron railing allows the eye to wander from the path by the riverside to the green pastures and lawns overshadowed by fine trees, to the old-fashioned façade of the “Trumpeters’ House,” while the more ambitious semi-classical design of Asgill House on the one hand, and of Queensberry House on the other, in closer proximity to the river, give an irregularity to the grouping, and perhaps accord better with the neighbouring town than the unbroken front of the Tudor palace is likely to have done. In its days, also, there were no bridges, and though the railway viaduct below might well be spared, the stone bridge must have improved a view of this kind. At any rate, this reach of the Thames is classic in art and literature; it has engaged the pencil of Turner, and is full of memories of Pope and Gay and Thomson.
The space between the two bridges seems to invite the traveller to linger. Fresh, perchance, from the streets of London, the odours of the underground railway still in his nostrils, the vapour of its smoky streets still lingering in his lungs, a little heated, it may be, and still mindful of towns in his walk from the railway station through Richmond streets to the bridge, he walks rapidly for a brief space along the towing-path, and then perforce halts in another and a new land. If, fortunately, he has chosen a day still early in the summer, before the average Londoner has quite realised that it is time to begin to take “an outing;” if he has arrived on the spot at an hour when the rowdy element, still, unhappily, too prominent among the dwellers in our metropolis, has not yet broken the peace of the Thames by those simian howlings or that loud-voiced blasphemy, which is deemed expressive of pleasure, then he will find it hard to detach himself from this reach of the river, and will imitate the elders of Richmond, two or three of whom he will generally find sunning or shading themselves on the benches near the waterside. Is it not enough to watch the trees almost dipping their branches in the stream, to find excitement in the hovering of a fly over its surface, in the splash of a fish, or even in the tiny swirls of the stream itself? In this dreamy calm which steals so quickly over us we watch the hovering butterfly or the flitting dragon-fly, the little dramas of animal life, their comedy or their tragedy, with an interest that causes the graver issues which we left behind barely an hour ago to fade from the mind. What more do we need after the noise of the streets than this perfect calm of the air, undisturbed save by the faint rustle of the breeze among the leaves, or the twittering note of a bird? What more, after the dusty pavements, than these glimpses of green lawn, of summer flowers in garden-beds or pendant from wall and trellis; of shadowy walks under green trees of Britain or darkling cedars from Lebanon? As we dream, memories rise of a dead-and-gone past—of many an episode of English history which is connected with this little reach of our river, perhaps the most classic ground on the Thames outside the precincts of the metropolis. Kings and queens, many a lord and lady of high degree, many a man on whom genius has conferred a place in history which birth alone cannot give, have loved to linger along this bit of Thames-side, or to float idly on its stream.
“Their mirth is sped; their gravest theme