The old Church of Chelsea, otherwise St. Luke's,--whose tower of darkened red-brick lends such picturesque effect to the Battersea reach beyond the Albert-Bridge,--is, both for its antiquity and its monuments, one of the most interesting churches in London. Its interior, never having been "restored," has a very old-world look; and it still retains, as when it was built, all the simplicity of the remote village church. Henry Kingsley, whose boyhood was spent in the delightful old Chelsea rectory, fittingly commemorates his father's church in his best-known story, "The Hillyars and the Burtons." "Four hundred years of memory," he makes Joe Burton say, "are crowded into that old church, and the great flood of change beats round the walls, and shakes the door in vain, but never enters. The dead stand thick together there, as if to make a brave resistance to the moving world outside, which jars upon their slumber. It is a church of the dead." Dean Stanley greatly loved this church: he used to call it "one of the chapters of his abbey." Here Sir Thomas More worshipped in the days of his power, and here, in the chapel that he built, is his monument. More lived himself near by, in a now vanished mansion called "Beaufort House," where, in his "fair garden," he received his friend Erasmus, and also, his king--Henry walking with his arm lovingly placed about his favourite's neck--that neck he was so soon to dissever. In Chelsea Church are the famous "chained books," Sir Hans Sloane's gift; the Bible, the Homilies, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs; enormous volumes heavily bound in leather with strong clasps, chained, underneath a bookcase, to a quaint lectern, where they may be read. This strange custom recalls the monkish days, when printed books were so rare and costly. The names of the guardian spirits of Chelsea, such as Lady Jane Cheyne and Sir Hans Sloane,--respectively lady and lord of the manor, after whom so many streets, squares, and courts have been christened,--recur here too on elaborate monuments and sarcophagi. Both were great benefactors to their parish church. Sir Hans Sloane's daughter was afterwards Lady Cadogan, and hence it was that the property came into the possession of the Cadogan family.