"In the gardens Sir Charles Fox built for us a huge barrack of wood, glass, and iron, which we called the 'Baronial Hall,' and which we filled with pictures and lithographs, and flags and calico, in our own peculiar fashion. We hired a large grazing-meadow at the back of the gardens, from a worthy Kensington cowkeeper, and having fitted up another barrack at one end of it, called it the 'Pré D'Orsay.' We memorialized the Middlesex magistrates, and, after a great deal of trouble, got a licence enabling us to sell wines and spirits, and to have music and dancing if we so chose. We sprinkled tents and alcoves all over our gardens, and built a gipsies' cavern, and a stalactite pagoda with double windows, in which gold and silver fish floated. And finally, having engaged an army of pages, cooks, scullions, waiters, barmaids, and clerks of the kitchen, we opened this monstrous place on the first of May, 1851, and bade all the world come and dine at SOYER'S SYMPOSIUM."
However, the ungrateful public disregarded the invitation, and poor Alexis Soyer is believed to have lost 4000_l._ by this enterprise. He died a few years after, at the early age of fifty. His friend Mr. Sala has said of him with true pathos:--"He was a vain man; but he was good and kind and charitable. There are paupers and beggars _even among French cooks_, and Alexis always had his pensioners and his alms-duns, to whom his hand was ever open. He was but a cook, but he was my dear and good friend."
We remember to have heard Soyer say of the writer of these truthful words, in reply to an inquiry as to the artist of the figures upon the staircase-walls, "He is a very clever fellow, of whom you will hear much,"--a prediction which has been fully verified.
Brompton, with its two centuries of Nursery fame, lasted to our time; southward, among "the Groves," were the Florida, Hoop and Toy, and other tea-garden taverns; there remains the Swan, with its bowling-green.
Knightsbridge was formerly a noted "Spring-Garden," with several taverns, of gay and questionable character. Some of the older houses have historical interest. The Rose and Crown, formerly the Oliver Cromwell, has been licensed above three hundred years. It is said to be the house which sheltered Wyat, while his unfortunate Kentish followers rested on the adjacent green. A tradition of the locality also is that Cromwell's body-guard was once quartered here, the probability of which is carefully examined in Davis's _Memorials of Knightsbridge_. The house has been much modernized of late years; "but," says Mr. Davis, "enough still remains in its peculiar chimneys, oval-shaped windows, the low rooms, large yard, and extensive stabling, with the galleries above, and office-like places beneath, to testify to its antiquity and former importance." The Rising Sun, hard by, is a seventeenth century red-brick house, which formerly had much carved work in the rooms, and a good staircase remains.