OLD BATTERSEA CHURCH, WHERE BLAKE WAS MARRIED, 164 SHOWING THE WINDOW FROM WHICH TURNER SKETCHED THE WESTERN END OF CHEYNE WALK 167 TURNER’S LAST DWELLING-PLACE 171 BATTERSEA BRIDGE AND CHURCH FROM TURNER’S HOUSE 176 * * * * * “OUT of monuments, names, wordes, proverbs, traditions, private recordes and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of bookes, and the like, we doe save and re-cover somewhat from the deluge of Time.”—_Bacon_, “_Advancement of Learning_”, _Book II_. “I have always loved to wander over the scenes inhabited by men I have known, admired, loved, or revered, as well amongst the living as the dead. The spots inhabited and preferred by a great man during his passage on the earth have always appeared to me the surest and most speaking relic of himself: a kind of material manifestation of his genius—a mute revelation of a portion of his soul—a living and sensible commentary on his life, actions, and thoughts.”—_Lamartine_, “_Pilgrimage to the Holy Land_.” “The man that is tired of London is tired of existence.”—_Samuel Johnson_. _Old Chelsea_. [Picture: The embankment mansions from Battersea] I HAD strolled, on a summer day, from Apsley House towards the then residence of Charles Reade at Knightsbridge, when I came upon one of those surprises of which London is still so full to me, even after more than a dozen years of fond familiarity with its streets and with all that they mean to the true lover of the Town. For, as I watched the ceaseless traffic of the turbulent turnings from the great thoroughfare down towards Chelsea, there came to my mind a phrase in the pages of its local historian: who, writing but a little earlier than the year 1830, points with pride to a project just then formed for the laying out of the latest of these very streets—at that day it was a new rural road cut through fields and swamps—and by it, he says, “Chelsea will obtain direct connection with London; and henceforth must be considered an integral part of the Great Metropolis of the British Empire”! It is hard to realise that only fifty years ago Chelsea was a rustic and retired village, far from London: even as was Islington, fifty years ago, when Charles Lamb, pensioned and set free from his desk in the India House, retired to that secluded spot with his sister to live “in a cottage, with a spacious garden,” as he wrote; with “the New River, rather elderly by this time, running in front (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed)”: even as was Kensington—“the old court suburb pleasantly situated on the great Western road”—just fifty years ago, when wits and statesmen drove between fields and market gardens to the rival courts of Gore House and of Holland House; and N. P. Willis delighted the feminine