Long before his day, there had lived, almost on this same spot, another “Hermit of Chelsea,” in the person of Dr. Tobias Smollett; who came here to live in retirement in 1750, fresh from the fame of his “Roderick Random;” seeking such seclusion partly on account of his daughter’s health and his own, and partly for the sake of his work. Here he wrote “Ferdinand Count Fathom,” finished Hume’s “History of England,” and began his translation of “Don Quixote;” and here took place those Sunday dinners, the delicious description of which, and of the guests, he has put into the mouth of young Jerry Melford, in “Humphrey Clinker.” Here were spent some of his happiest days, with his work and with his friends from town; Johnson, Garrick, Sterne, John Wilkes, John Hunter: the latter probably coming from Earl’s Court, Kensington, where his place—mansion, museum, and menagerie in one—stood till very lately. Smollett was as well known in the streets of Chelsea, in his day, as Carlyle in ours—“a good-sized, strongly-made man, graceful, dignified, and pleasant.” [Picture: Carlyle’s house, Great Cheyne Row] It was a fine old place, with extensive grounds, which Smollett took; being the ancient Manor House of the Lawrences, once owned by Henry VIII., as we have seen. The house stood exactly on the site of this block of two-storied brick cottages called “Little Cheyne Row,” between Great Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street. Its early history has little that need detain us, until, in 1714, it came to be called Monmouth House, from its new owner, the Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch; who came here with John Gay as her domestic steward or secretary, and who here lived to the age of ninety. She had been an ornament of Charles II.’s court, a real jewel amidst all the pinchbeck and paste of his setting. She was the widow of his son, the hapless Duke of Monmouth; “who began life with no legal right to his being, and ended it by forfeiting all similar right to his head.” It is to this gracious and gentle _chatelaine_ that Sir Walter Scott sings his “Lay of the Last Minstrel”: “For she had known adversity, Though born in such a high degree; In pride of power, in beauty’s bloom, Had wept o’er Monmouth’s bloody tomb.” Smollett left the place for ever, in 1769, and a little later, went to die in Spain; a brave, silent, sad man, for all the fun in his books, and already broken in health by the untimely death of his daughter. The Chelsea historian, Faulkner, writing in 1829, says that Monmouth House was then “a melancholy scene of desolation and ruin.” It was finally torn down and carted away in 1834. [Picture: The Chelsea Rectory]