Henry Kingsley especially appeals to us, just here, for that he has given us, in “The Hillyars and Burtons,” so vivid a picture of modern Chelsea—its streets and by-ways, its old houses and its venerable church, in delightful detail, as he saw them when a boy. The Hillyar family is a romantic reproduction of that ancient Chelsea family, the Lawrences; in “The Burtons” he gives us his reminiscence of the Wyatt household, living at Wargrave, Henley-on-Thames. The brave girl, Emma Burton, is a portrait of Emma Wyatt. The old home of the Burtons—“the very large house which stood by itself, as it were, fronting the buildings opposite our forge; which contained twenty-five rooms, some of them very large, and which was called by us, indifferently, Church Place, or Queen Elizabeth’s Place”—_this_ was the only one of the grand mansions just here in Chelsea left standing when the Kingsleys came here. “It had been in reality the palace of the young Earl of Essex; a very large three-storied house of old brick, with stone-mullioned windows and doorways.” You may see a print of it in “kind old Mr. Faulkner’s” book, as he found it in 1830, dilapidated then, and let out to many tenants. Later, it sunk lower still; and finally the grand old fabric—“which had been trodden often enough by the statesmen and dandies of Queen Elizabeth’s court, and most certainly by that mighty woman herself”—was demolished between 1840–42. The boy of ten or twelve then, Henry Kingsley, must have had the same feelings of wonder and regret, which he puts into the speech of Jim Burton, as he looked on this historic pile, roofless, dis-windowed, pickaxed to pieces. He is not quite correct in letting Jim Burton fix its site on the south side of Paultons Square; it stood between that square and Church Street, exactly where now stands a block of poor little one-storied houses, “Paulton Terrace, 1843,” painted on its pediment; and at the back, built in with some still more wretched little dwellings, you shall still see part of the palace wall of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, the son of the Putney blacksmith. From this ancient site I often walk, in company with the Burton brothers, Joe and Jim, their sister Emma and Erne Hillyar behind, down old Church Lane, now Church Street, haunted by historic shades, to where, at its foot, stands “Chelsea Old Church.”