“‘Courage!’ he said, and pointed towards the land;
‘This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.’
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.”[7]
Round the precincts of Chelsea Hospital it seems as if it were always Sunday.
Though frequented by Chelsea people, the grounds of the Hospital are but little known to the rest of London. Yet the east side is bordered by an avenue of pollarded Dutch elms worth going to see—an avenue dusky at mid-day, and, after dark, wanting only a ghost to make it perfect. Immediately beyond is all that remains of Ranelagh Gardens—the rival of Vauxhall in the middle of last century, when the Rotunda was the most fashionable lounge in London—now a miniature park, with trees, greensward, and flower-beds, and a large space set apart for the old pensioners, where they cultivate small plots of garden, and will sell you a nosegay of humble but odorous blooms for a few pence. It is pleasant, in the decaying light of a summer evening, to see the veterans tending their plants, watering or weeding, making up bunches of red and blue and yellow blossoms, and recollecting in their age that Adam was a gardener, not a soldier. Several of these men have faced the storm of battle, and left behind them arms or legs. Now they wait upon the gentle ways of Nature, before the setting of the sun.
With the Hospital grounds on one side, and Battersea Park on the other (the latter winning increased favour every year by its fine effects of wood and water), we come to the Chelsea Suspension Bridge, near neighbour of Battersea Bridge, which in 1890 superseded the older structure shown in our illustration on page 259, and now a thing of the past. The railway bridge from Victoria, a little beyond, is a pleasing specimen of its order. Railway viaducts are often abominations. That they can be otherwise is shown by some few instances. The railway bridge at Knaresborough, in Yorkshire, is really beautiful. But then it is of stone, not of iron. Iron bridges—excepting those slung on chains—can scarcely escape the reproach of ugliness. Vulcan himself must have forged the original, and infused into it something of his own deformity. But we have passed out of the stone into the iron age; the engineers have us in hand; and we must submit to a good deal of unloveliness for the sake of utility and cheapness. Stone bridges are works of architecture and art; wooden bridges have a certain rustic prettiness in the country; but the iron bridge of the railway harmonises with nothing. It so happens that just as we reach the Victoria Bridge we enter one of the most uninteresting parts of the river. With Pimlico on the one side, and the outskirts of New Battersea on the other, the eye and the mind are equally baulked of any agreeable subjects of contemplation. As regards associations, Pimlico is perhaps the most barren district in all London; and the part facing the Thames is a mere succession of commonplaces. We even hail Millbank Prison as a relief—though it would be difficult to imagine anything more dreary than that stern, gaunt structure, with a thousand heart-aches behind its walls.
Vauxhall, immediately opposite the great prison which Bentham designed as a model penitentiary, at a time when such experiments were in vogue, has some attractive memories, if only on account of the famous Gardens, which the members of the youthful generation know not, but which their elders bear in genial memory; and when we get to Lambeth, of which Vauxhall is only a precinct, we are on memorial ground indeed. Lambeth is so large a place (its circumference is said to be about sixteen miles) that in 1846 it was subdivided into four parishes; but the most interesting part is that which borders on the river. A certain indescribable quaintness—a dusky hue of tradition and romance—hangs about the neighbourhood. The very name is of unknown etymology, and has a sort of Hebrew sound, though it is probably Anglo-Saxon in some corrupted form. In earlier times, the suburb, as we read in an old account, was celebrated for “astrologers and almanack-makers”—much the same kind of people in days when men believed in the influences of the stars. Francis Moore (“Old Moore,” whose Prophetic Almanack still finds readers) was a dweller in Lambeth; and so, likewise, was Simon Forman, who was connected with the mysterious murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613. Lambeth, moreover, has an ancient reputation for unusual crimes. In 1041—a sufficiently remote date for that fascinating twilight in which it is not easy to discriminate between fact and fiction—the Danish King, Hardicanute, died suddenly in Lambeth, at a banquet given on account of some great lord’s marriage. By many it was supposed that he had been poisoned; but it is perhaps more probable that he succumbed to a stroke of apoplexy or paralysis, induced by excessive gluttony. Less open to question is the narrative of a stupendous crime committed in 1531 by a cook in the service of Dr. Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who had a palace near the archiepiscopal residence. According to Holinshed, the cook threw some poison into a vessel of yeast, and thus not merely destroyed seventeen persons belonging to the family, but also killed some poor people who were fed at the gate. The conclusion of this horrible story is worthy of the beginning. The offender was boiled to death in Smithfield, in pursuance of a law made for that very case, but repealed in 1547. There may, however, be some doubt as to the proportions of the crime. Stow says that, out of seventeen persons poisoned, only two died.
