In the embankment gardens we have passed a statue recently placed there; a man seated in a chair, uncouth of figure, with bent brow and rugged face. And in the wall of the corner house behind we stop to look at a small memorial tablet, still more recently placed; a medallion portrait of the same face, and beneath, this inscription: “Thomas Carlyle lived at 24, Cheyne Row, 1834–81.” For this is not the house in which he lived, and the tablet was fixed on this one with queer common sense, his own being in Chancery at that time! It is to be found farther up in this little dull street running from Cheyne Walk just here; in which there is nothing that is not commonplace, save the little cottage covered with vines, in the wall above which is a stone with odd old-fashioned lettering—“This is Gt. Cheyne Row, 1708.” About the middle of the row of small dreary brick houses, the one once numbered 5, now 24, is that in which he dwelt for nearly fifty years, and wherein he wrote his commination service large on all mankind; talking more eloquently, and more loquaciously withal, in praise of silence, than any man who ever scolded all through life that he might do honour to the strong arm and the still tongue! [Picture: Statue of Thomas Carlyle, by Boehm] The look-out across the narrow street from his front windows—“mainly into trees,” he wrote to Sir William Hamilton, on moving here—shows now nothing but a long, low, depressing wall, above which rises a many-windowed model dwelling-house; and it is surely one of the least inspiring prospects in all London: while from the back he could see nothing of interest except the westernmost end of the old wall of Henry VIII.’s Manor House garden, which still stands here. It gave him a hint in his pamphlet, “Shooting Niagara;” wherein, sneering at modern bricks and bricklayers, he says: “Bricks, burn them rightly, build them faithfully with mortar faithfully tempered, _they_ will stand. . . . We have them here at the head of this garden, which are in their third or fourth century.”