readers of the _New York Mirror_ with his gossip about his visits to Lady Blessington and about the celebrities who bowed before her. To-day all these villages, along with many even more remote, are one with London. Yet, more than any of them, has Chelsea kept its old village character—albeit preserving but few of its old village features. Of the many magnificent mansions which gave it the name of “The Village of Palaces” five alone still stand—Blacklands, Gough, Lindsey, Stanley and Walpole Houses—and these are greatly altered. I shall show you all of them in our stroll to-day. In between them, and away beyond them, streets have been cut, new quarters built: made up in part of “genteel” villas and rows of respectable residences; but in great part, also, of cheap dwellings, of small and shabby shops. These extremes render much of modern Chelsea utterly uninteresting, except mayhap to the collector of rents or to the inspector of nuisances. Yet much of that which is truly ancient and honourable has been fondly kept untouched, and not ignobly cleaned, as in next-door Kensington. Alongside this artistic squalor we have the curious contrast of artistic splendour in a blazing, brand-new quarter, of which the sacred centre is Tite Street. Here, amid much that is good and genuine in our modern manner, there is an aggressive affectation of antiquity shown by the little houses and studios obtruding on the street, by the grandiose piles of mansions towering on the embankment: all in raging red brick, and in the so-called Queen Anne style. The original article, deadly dull and decorous as it may be, has yet a decent dignity of its own as a real relic, not found in this painful pretence of ancient quaintness. This is a quarter, however, much in vogue; mighty swells dwell here, and here pose some famous _farceurs_ in art and literature; here, too, work many earnest men and women in all pursuits of life. These latter plentifully people every part of Chelsea, for the sake of the seclusion and the stillness they seek and here find: just as there settled here for the same reasons, two centuries ago and earlier, men of learning and of wealth, scholars and nobles, who kept themselves exclusive by virtue of their birth or their brains. And so this privileged suburb, “Where fruitful Thames salutes the learned shore,”