All this is ancient history, of which there is little trace to-day. The shades of Sir Robert Walpole, Dean Swift, Fielding and Smollett, and good Dr. Burney, Fanny’s father, who was organist of Chelsea Hospital and buried in its now closed cemetery, may still haunt Chelsea; but the actual homes of the people of living memory make a more vivid appeal. Chelsea still keeps up the reputation of being the haunt of famous people. Unlike the inhabitants of the Paris Latin Quarter, artists and poets who have once breathed her air do not remove to more fashionable Mayfair streets when they have “arrived.” And what a brilliant band of them were found in the Chelsea of the nineteenth century! Meredith wrote _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ at No. 7 Hobury Street; Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their youth in the old rectory in Church Street when their father was rector of Chelsea Old Church; George Eliot moved her household gods to No. 4 Cheyne Walk, the beautiful house where Daniel Maclise, the early Victorian painter, had lived, only three short weeks before her death; and Cecil Lawson, the painter of _The Harvest Moon_ in the Tate Gallery, lived at No. 15. A volume might be written about Cheyne Walk alone; those pleasant red-brick houses with their wrought-iron railings were the homes of some of the greatest geniuses of the Victorian age. Turner lived at 118 for the four years before his death in 1851: Rossetti lived at No. 16 with Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti. Meredith had some idea of joining this _ménage_, but recoiled at the sight of Rossetti’s oft-quoted poached eggs “bleeding to death” on cold bacon very late in the morning. He paid a quarter’s rent and decided to live by himself. The Rev. Mr. Haweis was a later tenant of this famous house, which, in spite of popular tradition, has no connection with Catherine of Braganza. Mrs. Gaskell, the authoress of _Cranford_, was born at No. 93. Whistler spent twelve years at No. 96, and here he painted the portraits of his mother and Carlyle. The painter had many Chelsea houses, from 101 Cheyne Walk, where he lived for four years from 1873, to the White House in Tite Street which he built, and, after his quarrel with the architect, adorned with a truly Whistlerian inscription, now removed, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. This house was built by Mr. X.” William de Morgan and Leigh Hunt lived in Chelsea, but the man whose memory is the most vivid of all this brilliant group was Thomas Carlyle. His house at 24 Cheyne Row is a memorial museum open to any visitor on the payment of one shilling, sixpence on Saturday. The house is kept exactly as it was in the days which Mr. Blunt has so charmingly described in his book _The Carlyles’ Chelsea Home_.