Carlyle’s and Rossetti’s monuments—Paradise Row as it used to be—Hortense de Mazarin—Whistler’s White House and the Victoria Hospital—The Physick Garden—Swan Walk and Doggett’s race for the “Coat and Badge”—The Royal Hospital—Poor, pretty Nelly’s pleasure house—The Chapel—The Hall—An American offer—A French Eagle—Walpole House and a Queen at dinner—Ranelagh and its Rotunda—The Pensioners’ Gardens.

IN the Embankment Gardens, facing Cheyne Row and Queen’s House respectively, are the statue of Carlyle by Boehm and the Drinking Fountain Memorial to Rossetti, with a portrait in relief by his friend, Ford Madox Brown. Both are excellent likenesses, though Carlyle’s is a peaceful presentment, and Rossetti’s mournful and rather repellent.

Passing through the gardens, I have often been reminded of the Greek painter and the birds who pecked at his grapes, for the children often stop to finger the pile of books under Carlyle’s chair. “They’m real books, ain’t they, missus, wat the old genelman wrote?” Thus we talk of Carlyle still, a stone’s throw from his study windows. It is interesting to know that the annual number of visitors to the Carlyle House increases steadily, and the custodian assures us that the knowledge of his works—intelligent, not merely curious—increases also, though among Colonials and Americans he is better known than among ordinary English people. And for “Colonials” read Scotch, or Scotch extracted.

Leaving Cheyne Walk behind and walking eastward, we pass blocks of new flats and modern houses where once was Queen’s Road and beautiful Paradise Row—a terrace of houses that three hundred years ago was a centre of life and fashion. Here lived Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin, who dared not marry Charles II. in his days of exile, but flirted with him extensively later, and accepted a pension from him of £4,000 a year, which she spent on riotous entertainments rather than on paying her just rates and debts. Charles, Duke of St. Albans, son of Nell Gwynn and the Merry Monarch, lived here, and so did Mary Astell, the Suffragette of her times, whose advanced views found little favour with the wits at the Don Saltero or the fashionables of the Court, though serious John Evelyn sees fit to commend her. Dukes and earls and “smart” bishops jostled each other in Paradise Row in the gay Stuart days, then artists, physicians, scientists, and schoolmasters succeeded to the fine old houses with their stately forecourts, and Elizabeth Fry established her “School of Discipline” for homeless and vagabond girls at the corner in 1828. Finally, in 1908 it was swept away, and re-created to meet modern requirements as Royal Hospital Road.

Tite Street turns off towards the river, and holds two buildings of note: Mr. Whistler’s White House, which looks as if it had strayed out of its way from Constantinople, and the Victoria Hospital for Children, a splendid new building, embracing, as its nucleus, Gough House, built by the Earl of Carberry in Charles II.’s time. Sir Richard Gough, who succeeded the Earl, gave it its name. The hospital is an unspeakable boon to the poor of the district; it has seventy beds, and a very extensive out-patients’ department, as well as a convalescent home at Broadstairs. Visitors can visit it daily between 2 and 4 p.m., and all parents must owe it their gratitude for its devotion to the cause of all children in illness.

The Physick Garden entrance faces Swan Walk, and a ring at the resounding bell in the wall will bring an answering gardener, who will admit the inquiring visitor; but it is generally understood that such visits are made for reasons of botanical or scientific research.

There is no fee, but visitors sign their names in the register, and, if I am not mistaken, enter the object of their special study. The garden, presented by Sir Hans Sloane to the Apothecaries Company, is mainly designed for the use and assistance of students of medicine and botany. All the plants grown in it have their medicinal value. Only one of the Lebanon cedars planted in 1683 remains.

LinnÆus, Sir Joseph Banks, Mrs. Elizabeth Blackwell (the “better horse” of the luckless Alexander Blackwell, who dwelt in Swan Walk and would never have written his Herbal without “the grey mare’s” clever assistance), Philip Miller, of the Gardeners’ Dictionary, all loved the Physick Garden, and used it as Sir Hans intended.

The old houses in Swan Walk—four or five in number—are all beautiful in their stately proportions and mellow colouring.

The “Old Swan Inn,” a hostel for country junketings in Pepys’s time, stood on the waterside till the Embankment came to Chelsea. It was the goal for Doggett’s watermen’s race, still rowed on August 1 in commemoration of the Protestant Succession. This year, 1914, it will celebrate its 200th anniversary. The “Coat and Badge” (the latter the silver token of the White Horse of Hanover) were annually held by the victor, and a couple of guineas accrued to him as well from the loyal Irish Orangemen’s pockets. Wentworth House, on the Embankment, now occupies the site, and the “Old Paradise Wharf and Stairs” were just beyond.

And now, whether we walk by the Embankment or by the parallel road, we reach the grounds of the Royal Hospital—that most perfect work of Sir Christopher Wren, which, oddly enough, Chelsea people still persist in calling “Controversy College,” Archbishop Laud’s name for it when James I. tried to coax it into a sort of theological academy. If you ask your way to the Royal Hospital, you will invariably be corrected, and “the College” substituted, and why the name remains is a Chelsea mystery.

Nell Gwynn’s part in its foundation as an asylum for old soldiers may be a myth, but is as certain to live as the Hospital to stand. “What is this? King Charles’s Hospital?” and its pretty rejoinder, “And Nelly’s pleasure house,” was almost the most popular quotation of our Chelsea Pageant in June 1908.

Every 29th of May King Charles’s statue is wreathed with oak, and the pensioners get double rations of beef and plum pudding, and if you fall into conversation with one of the red-coated old soldiers in the hospital gardens, where they love to saunter and watch the nursemaids and the children and the emancipated terriers of a morning, you will find that he is well up in the legend of “poor, pretty Nelly,” and proud of his connection with an institution which is in no sense a charity.

It is impossible here to describe all that is to be seen at Chelsea Hospital, but there is no difficulty in going over it—either with a guide from the secretary’s office on application, or informally by presenting oneself at service at the Chapel on Sundays (11 a.m. and 6.30 p.m.) and glancing into the hall and the kitchens as one passes out through the beautiful colonnade, which gives upon the garden side. The old pensioners are courteous to visitors and love to show all they can. The great staircases leading to the rooms above are worth noticing, and so are the doorways, and the wonderful balance and proportion of the long lines of windows. Restrictions are few, and one is struck by the ease and freedom of the place, as compared with similar institutions in other countries.

In the chapel, the wonderful collection of flags taken in action is worth studying, with the official handbook; perhaps as interesting a study is that of the faces and expressions of the ranks of old soldiers as they sit in orderly rows. The service is not long, though when the preacher allows himself an extra five minutes’ law, I have seen a hand steal tentatively to a coat-pocket, and a before-dinner pipe stealthily prepared under shelter of the pew ledge.

The Communion plate—silver-gilt and presented by James I. to his theologians—is magnificent. An American visitor once offered the existing chaplain an exact replica of all the articles, and a thousand pounds for himself, if he would permit the set to be copied, and “no questions asked.” The transatlantic enthusiast went away with a very poor idea of English business capacity.

In the hall, which is now the pensioners’ recreation room, there are numberless objects of interest. We can only instance the case of unclaimed medals, and the “Black Jack” leather kegs used in the canteen of the Army in Flanders in Marlborough’s campaigns.

In the hall the Duke of Wellington’s coffin lay in state November 1852, and during the crowd and excitement of the two days’ ceremony, one of the French Eagles taken at Waterloo was stolen—re-captured, it is supposed, by French visitors.

The sittings in the chapel are allotted to the officers and staff of the hospital (note the Whitster’s Pew, where sits the head of the laundry), but visitors can generally find accommodation if they present themselves at the Sunday services.

Walpole House, now the Infirmary, was once the residence of the great Whig Minister, and in his garden George II. and Caroline the Illustrious, when Prince and Princess of Wales, sometimes sat down to dinner, while Chelsea people stared at them through the adjacent railings. A special permission is necessary to view the Infirmary.

One other Royal remembrance, and I must close this inadequate account of the Royal Hospital treasures. There is a fine bust of Queen Victoria executed especially for the hall, and paid for by every man in the hospital giving his pay for one day—that day being the great Jubilee of 1887. It shows the great Queen at her noblest and best, as her soldiers love to remember her.

East of the hospital lie Ranelagh Gardens, beautiful in their placid old age, and reminiscent in their glades and winding walks of a gay and frivolous past. The huge Rotunda, where nearly three thousand persons could circulate with ease, went out of fashion about 1750. Balloon ascents and fireworks ceased to attract, and in 1804 the big building was pulled down, and the gardens incorporated in the hospital grounds.

To-day the pensioners’ little plots of garden, to the north of Ranelagh, are fuller of interest than this flimsy spectre of past gaiety. Some of the old men are ingenious gardeners; each one expresses himself in his allotted space, and builds a rockery, an arbour, or a fountain as his fancy directs, and will gladly sell a nosegay of old-fashioned flowers to a passing stranger.

Truly Nell Gwynn and Sir Christopher Wren have given the old soldiers a goodly heritage in the Royal Hospital.

NOTES