A Walk from London to FulhamCroker, Thomas Crofton
History
A Walk from London to Fulham
Croker, Thomas Crofton
London (England) -- Description and travel
“Nothing would seem to have escaped his lynx-like vigilance. Let the
object be what it may (especially if it related to poetry), let the
volume be great or small, or contain good, bad, or indifferent
warblings of the Muse, his insatiable craving had ‘stomach for all.’
We may consider his collection the fountain-head of these copious
streams, which, after fructifying in the libraries of many
bibliomaniacs in the first half of the eighteenth century, settled
for awhile more determinedly in the curious book-reservoir of a Mr.
Wynne, and hence breaking up and taking a different direction towards
the collections of Farmer, Steevens, and others, they have almost
lost their identity in the innumerable rivulets which now inundate
the book-world.”
It is to the literary taste of Mr. Edward Wynne, as asserted by Dr.
Dibdin, that modern book-collectors are indebted for the preservation of
most of the choicest relics of the Bibliotheca Luttrelliana.
“Mr. Wynne,” he continues, “lived at Little Chelsea, and built his
library in a room which had the reputation of having been Locke’s
study. Here he used to sit surrounded by innumerable books, a great
part being formed by ‘an eminent and curious collector in the last
century.’”
What Dr. Dibdin says respecting Mr. Wynne’s building a library and
Locke’s study is inaccurate, as there can be no reasonable doubt that the
room or rooms his library occupied were those built by Lord Shaftesbury,
which had (and correctly) the reputation of having been his lordship’s
library, and the study, not of Locke, although of Locke’s pupil and
friend. It is not even probable that Lord Shaftesbury was ever visited
by our great philosopher at Little Chelsea, as from 1700 that illustrious
man resided altogether at Oates, in Essex, where he died on the 28th of
October, 1704.
Whether to Lord Shaftesbury or to Mr. Luttrell the embellishments of the
garden of their residence are to be attributed can now be only matter for
conjecture, unless some curious autograph-collector’s portfolio may by
chance contain an old letter or other document to establish the claim.
Their tastes, however, were very similar. They both loved their books,
and their fruits and flowers, and enjoyed the study of them. [Picture:
Summer-house] An account drawn up by Mr. Luttrell of several pears which
he cultivated at Little Chelsea, with outlines of their longitudinal
sections, was communicated to the Horticultural Society by Dr. Luttrell
Wynne, one hundred years after the notes had been made, and may be found
printed in the second volume of the Transactions of that Society. In
this account twenty-five varieties of pears are mentioned, which had been
obtained between the years 1712 and 1717 from Mr. Duncan’s, Lord
Cheneys’s, Mr. Palmer’s, and Mr. Selwood’s nursery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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