328 THROUGH THE FIELDS WITH LINNAEUS 



painting of ' Ye Goat in Boots.' Much of this poetic 

 odour has vanished with the departed Brompton stocks. 



Carlyle describes Chelsea as a singular heterogeneous 

 kind of spot, very dirty and confused in some places, 

 quite beautiful in others, abounding with antiquities 

 and the traces of great men Sir Thomas More, Steele, 

 Smollett, &c. ' Picture a parade running along the shore 

 of the river ; a broad highway with huge shady trees ; 

 boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping and tan ; 

 Battersea Bridge (of wood) a few yards off ; the broad 

 river, with white-trousered, white-shirted Cockneys 

 dashing by like arrows in their long canoes of boats ; 

 beyond, the green beautiful hills of Surrey with their 

 villages ; on the whole a most artificial, green-painted, 

 yet lively, fresh, almost opera-looking business, such as 

 you can fancy. Stroll on the bank of the river and see 

 white-shirted Cockneys in their green canoes, or old 

 pensioners pensively smoking tobacco.' Having become 

 fashionable again with its new embankment, bridges, and 

 its rose-red houses, Chelsea is now more heterogeneous 

 than ever ; a greater mixture of blackness and bright- 

 ness, of squalor and wealth. 



Linnseus went to Wimbledon Common and to Kew 

 pretty, peaceful, still graceful, retired and courtly 

 Kew, the village of dowagers, with its lanes of elms, 

 and soft river scenes with mildly- active life upon them, 

 of a well-to-do pleasuring sort, where the tender grace 

 of a day that has fled seems ever to come back to us. 

 It is like the summer evening of life of modern life ; its 



