'Would sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.' "A few old, quiet streets and rows, with names and sites dear to the antiquary, ran down to the Thames, then a stranger to steamboats; a row of noble elms along its strand lent their deep shade to some quaint old houses with heavy architraves, picturesque flights of steps, and elaborate gates; while Queen Elizabeth's Walk, the Bishop's Walk, and the Bishop's Palace gave a kind of dignity to the more modern designations of the neighbourhood. "When the Thames was the great highway, and every nobleman had his six or eight oared barge, the banks of the river as high as Chelsea were studded with country houses. At the foot of Battersea Bridge, which in those days did not disfigure the beautiful reach, Sir Thomas More, then a private gentleman and eminent lawyer in full practice, built the capital family house which was afterwards successively occupied by the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Dacre, Lord Burleigh, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, Lord Middlesex, the first Duke of Buckingham, Sir Bulstrode Whitlock, the second Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, and the Duke of Beaufort. It stood about a hundred yards from the river; its front exhibited a projecting porch in the centre, and four bay windows alternating with eight large casements; while its back presented a confused assemblage of jutting casements, pent-houses, and gables in picturesque intricacy of detail, affording 'coigns of vantage,' we doubt not, to many a tuft of golden moss and stone-crop. This dwelling, which for convenience and beauty of situation and interior comfort was so highly prized by its many and distinguished occupants, appears at length to have been pulled down when it became rickety and untenantable from sheer old age--in Ossian's words, 'gloomy, windy, and full of ghosts.'" Nor was Miss Manning obliged to rely only on her memory for a picture of More's house as it had been. The site, when she knew it, was like the New Place at Stratford-on-Avon, where only a few stones and foundations enable us to picture how stood the house where Shakespeare died. But while the household was still fresh in men's minds, and More was beginning to be reverenced as a martyr and a saint, Ellis Heywood published at Florence, in 1556, his sketch, "Il Moro," in which he set in a true description of the Chelsea garden an imaginary picture of the Chancellor and his friends talking on matters of high import to soul and spirit. "From one part of the garden," he tells us, "almost the whole of the noble city of London was visible, and from another the beautiful Thames, with green meadows and wooded hills all around." The garden had its own charm too. "It was crowned with an almost perpetual verdure, and the branches of the fruit-trees that grew near were interwoven in a manner so beautiful that it seemed like a living tapestry worked by Nature herself."