Turning back again to Paradise Row, we glance across the road at a great square mansion standing in spacious grounds, used as the Victoria Hospital for Children, a beneficent institution. This is Gough House, built by that profane Earl of Carberry, who diced and drank and dallied in company with Buckingham and Rochester and Sedley. Early in the last century it came into possession of Sir John Gough, whence the name it still retains. Nearly two centuries of odd doings and of queer social history tenant these walls; but we can pause no longer than to glance at the little cots standing against the ancient wainscotting of the stately rooms, and the infant patients toddling up the massive oak staircases. [Picture: Tite street] We turn the corner, and pass through Tite Street, and so come, in refreshing contrast with its ambitious artificiality, to a bit of genuine nature—a great garden stretching from Swan Walk and the Queen’s Road, and fronting just here on the Embankment. On one of the great stone posts of this entrance—once the water-gate—we read: “The Botanic Garden of the Society of Apothecaries of London, A.D. 1673;” on the other: “Granted to the Society in Perpetuity by Sir Hans Sloane, Bart., A.D. 1723.” These grounds remain intact as when in this last-named year four acres of Lord Cheyne’s former domain were made over to the Society of Apothecaries for “The Chelsea Physick Garden;” with permission to build thereon a barge-house and offices, for their convenience when they came up the river. The buildings were demolished in 1853, but the gardens have bravely held out against the Vandal hordes of bricklayers and builders; and in them all the herbs of Materia Medica which can grow in the open air are cultivated to this very day for the instruction of medical students, just as when Dr. Johnson’s Polyphilus—the universal genius of the _Rambler_—started to come out here from London streets to see a new plant in flower. The trees are no longer so vigorous as when Evelyn, so fond of fine trees, praised them; and of the twelve noble Cedars of Lebanon planted by the hand of Sir Hans, but one still stands; and this one, even in its decrepitude, is nearly as notable, it seems to me, as that glorious unequalled one in the private garden of Monseigneur the Archbishop of Tours. In the centre stands the statue of Sir Hans Sloane, put up in 1733, chipped and stained by wind and weather. For, in this garden Hans Sloane studied, and when he became rich and famous and bought the manor of Chelsea, he gave the freehold of this place to the Apothecaries’ Company on condition that it should be devoted for ever to the use of all students of nature.