There have been many other saintly men whom one reveres, but surely none with such wide sympathies. He entertained Erasmus with learned talk, but he also entertained John Heywood the playwright and Court jester. He was wise, but he was also witty, and of which modern philosopher could it be told “that when an interlude was performed, he would make one among the players, occasionally coming upon them with surprise, and without rehearsal fall into a character, and support the part by his extemporaneous invention and acquit himself with credit.” Dear Sir Thomas More of delectable memory--it is good to come across signs that you still live in English hearts, even if they take the form of stucco decorations on a Lyons tea house in Carey Street. It was Sir Thomas More who first made Chelsea the fashion, though an old Manor house that stood near the church had many lordly owners before Henry VIII. bought it and, following More’s example, built himself the big country mansion of which there are still traces in the basements of the houses on the corner of Cheyne Walk and Oakley Street. The King is also said to have had a hunting lodge near by and part of it still exists at the end of Glebe Place in a small rather dilapidated building. Sir Thomas More had built his house on the site of the present Beaufort Street and it stood there till Sir Hans Sloane, the Chelsea Baron Haussmann of that day, pulled it down in 1740. The lovely gardens went down to the river. Henry VIII. used to come and dine here, and walk with his arm round the neck of the friend he afterwards brought to the block, and here More received his other famous friends, among them Erasmus, and Holbein, who stayed with him for three years, painting many portraits. It is pleasant to think that the spirit of More’s hospitality lived again during the war and curiously enough at this very place and in one of his own houses. For though his country home was destroyed, his town house, Crosby Hall, built as the great town mansion of Sir John Crosby, a merchant prince, in 1466, was brought from Bishopsgate piece by piece in 1910, and four years later the marvellous timbered roof looked down on the groups of Belgian fugitives that were sheltered there. If you ask the porter at More’s Gardens, a big block of flats on the north-east corner of Battersea Bridge, for the key of Crosby Hall, he will unlock a door in an ugly hoarding facing the embankment, close to Chelsea Old Church. [Illustration: CROSBY HALL]