Page:Old and New London, vol. 1.djvu/31

 above all, there is Holland House, the scene of the delightful Whig coteries of Tom Moore's time. Here Addison lived to regret his marriage with a lady of rank, and here he died. At Kensington Charles James Fox spent his youth.

And now Chelsea brings us pleasant recollections of Sir Thomas More, Swift, Sir Robert Walpole, and Atterbury. "Chelsith," Sir Thomas More used to call it when Holbein was lodging in his house and King Henry, who afterwards beheaded his old friend, used to come to dine, and after dinner would walk round the fair garden with his arm round his host's neck. More was fond of walking on the flat roof of his gate-house, which commanded a pleasant prospect of the Thames and the fields beyond. Let us hope the tradition is not true that he used to bind heretics to a tree in his garden. In 1717 Chelsea contained only 350 houses, and these in 1725 had grown to 1,350. There is Cheyne Walk, so called from the Lords Cheyne, owners of the manor; and we must not forget Don Saltero and his famous coffee-house, the oddities of which Steele pleasantly sketched in the Tatler. The Don was famous for his skill in brewing punch and for his excellent playing on the fiddle. He was also a barber, who drew teeth, drew customers, wrote verses, and collected curiosities.
 * "Some relics of the Sheban queen
 * And fragments of the famed Bob Crusoe."

Swift lodged at Chelsea, over against the Jacobite Bishop Atterbury, who so nearly lost his head. In one of his delightful letters to Stella Swift describes "the Old Original Chelsea Bun House," and the r-r-r-r-rare Chelsea buns. He used to leave his best gown and perriwig at Mrs. Vanhomrig's, in Suffolk Street, then walk up Pall Mall, through the park, out at Buckingham House, and on to Chelsea, a little beyond the church (5,748 steps), he says, in less than an hour, which was leisurely walking even for the contemplative and observant dean. Smollet laid a scene of his "Humphrey Clinker" in Chelsea, where he lived for some time.

The Princess Elizabeth, when a girl, lived at Chelsea, with that dangerous man, with whom she is said to have fallen in love, the Lord Admiral, Seymour, afterwards beheaded. He was the second husband of Katherine Parr, one of the many wives of Elizabeth's father. Cremorne was, in Walpole's days, the villa of Lord Cremorne, an Irish nobleman; and near here, at a river-side