[Picture: Statue of Sir Han’s Sloane in the Botanic Gardens]
Just beyond, at Flood Street, begins Cheyne Walk; still, despite almost daily despoiling, despite embankments and gas and cabs, the most old-fashioned, dignified, and impressive spot in all London. Those of its modest brick houses which remain have not been ruined by too many modern improvements; they are prim and respectable, clad in a sedate secluded sobriety, not at all of this day. Their little front gardens are unpretending and almost sad. Between them and the street are fine specimens of old wrought iron in railings and in gates, in last century brackets for lamps, in iron extinguishers for the links they used to carry. The name “Hans Sloane House” is wrought in open iron letters, in the gate of No. 17; in others, the numbers alone are thus worked in the antique pattern. “Manor House” has an attractive old plaster front; on another a shining brass plate, dimly marked “Gothic House” in well-worn letters, is just what we want to find there. In No. 4 died, on the night of the 22nd December, 1880, Mrs. John Walter Cross, more widely known as George Eliot. And in this same house lived for many years Daniel Maclise, the painter of the two grandest national pictures yet produced in England; “the gentlest and most modest of men,” said his friend Charles Dickens. Here he died on the 25th of April, 1870, and from here he was carried to Kensal Green.
In No. 15 lived for a long time that youthful genius, Cecil Lawson; whose admirable works, rejected at one time by the Royal Academy, have been hung in places of honour, since. One would be glad to have stepped from his studio into that next door, No. 16, and to have seen Dante Gabriel Rossetti at work there. { 109} His house—now again known by its ancient and proper title, “Queen’s House”—stands back between court and garden, its stately double front bowed out by a spacious central bay, the famous drawing-room on the first floor taking the whole width. This great bay, as high as the house, is not so old, however; and must be an addition of more recent years; for the house itself plainly dates from the days of the Stuarts. Indeed, it shows the influence, if not the very hand, of the admirable Wren; not only in the external architecture, but in the perfect proportion to all its parts of the panelling, the windows, the doorways within. All the hall-ways and the rooms, even to the kitchen, are heavily wainscotted; and there mounts, up through the whole height of the interior, a spiral staircase, its balustrade of finest hand-wrought iron. So, too, are the railings and the gateway of the front courtyard, as you see them in our sketch; and, while much of their dainty detail has been gnawed away by the tooth of time, they still show the skill, the patience, and the conscience of the workers of that earlier day. The iron crown which once topped this gate has long since been taken away; but we may still trace in twisted iron the initials “C. R.,” and we may still see these same initials in larger iron lettering within the pattern of the back-garden railings. Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England, is the name they are believed to commemorate; and legend says that this house was once tenanted by, and perhaps built for, that long-suffering consort of Charles II. I like to fancy her within these walls—the brilliant brunette stepping down from Lely’s canvas at Hampton Court or at Versailles; whose superb black eyes were celebrated by the court poet, Edmund Waller, in an ode on her birthday, and were characterized by sedate John Evelyn as “languishing and excellent”; and who was pronounced to be “mighty pretty” by that erudite and studious critic of female beauty, Samuel Pepys. She wears the black velvet costume so becoming to her, and divides her days between pious rites and frisky dances—devoted equally to both! A narrow, bigoted, good woman, this: yet, withal, simple, confiding, affectionate, modest, patient under neglect from her husband, and under insult from his mistresses; deserving a little longer devotion than the six weeks Charles vouchsafed to her after their marriage, never deserving the lampoons with which Andrew Marvel befouled her.