Booksellers and bookselling -- England -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction
endure to see the shop of a second-hand bookseller established in
Cheapside?
Perhaps, however, the most delightful spot in all London for a
second-hand bookshop is that occupied by Emblem's in the King's Road,
Chelsea.
It stands at the lower end of the road, where one begins to realize
and thoroughly feel the influences of that ancient and lordly suburb.
At this end of the road there are rows of houses with old-fashioned
balconies; right and left of it there are streets which in the summer
and early autumn are green, yellow, red, and golden with their masses
of creepers; squares which look as if, with the people living in them,
they must belong to the year eighteen hundred; neither a day before
nor a day after; they lie open to the road, with their gardens full of
trees. Cheyne Walk and the old church, with its red-brick tower, and
the new Embankment, are all so close that they seem part and parcel of
the King's Road. The great Hospital is within five minutes' walk, and
sometimes the honest veterans themselves may be seen wandering in the
road. The air is heavy with associations and memories. You can
actually smell the fragrance of the new-made Chelsea buns, fresh from
the oven, just as you would a hundred years ago. You may sit with
dainty damsels, all hoops and furbelows, eating custards at the
Bun-house; you may wander among the rare plants of the Botanic
Gardens. The old great houses rise, shadowy and magnificent, above the
modern terraces; Don Saltero's Coffee-House yet opens its hospitable
doors; Sir Thomas More meditates again on Cheyne Walk; at dead of
night the ghosts of ancient minuet tunes may be heard from the Rotunda
of Ranelagh Gardens, though the new barracks stand upon its site; and
along the modern streets you may fancy that if you saw the ladies with
their hoop petticoats, and the gentlemen with their wigs and their
three-cornered hats and swords, you would not be in the least
astonished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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