GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



This house is the little messuage which appears in the illustration. 

 The Hogarths were intending to set up their " chariot," therefore 

 the considerable distance between their cottage for it is but little 

 more and Leicester Fields, was no deterrent. 



Even at the present day the water-side parts of Chiswick are 

 wonderfully picturesque, and there are bits that are entirely 

 unspoilt. The church, considerably restored, but with a tower 

 built by Vicar Brydell, about 1420, stands well, at a fine bend of 

 the river a river that, even at this point, is still beautiful at high 

 tide and the old-world houses on the Mall facing the island, or 

 Eyot, with little enclosed front-gardens between roadway and 

 water, command a pleasant prospect of it. With these attractions, 

 Chiswick in the twentieth century, can easily hold its own in friendly 

 rivalry with Hampstead and Highgate, where many quaint corners 

 still exist. But in the eighteenth century and earlier, i.e., in 

 Commonwealth and Revolutionary times, before that arch-enemy 

 of natural beauty the ubiquitous jerry- builder had covered the 

 meadows, lanes, and market-gardens that lay between the river and 

 the high-road, with rows of ugly, fourth-rate streets the entire 

 village must have been a charming spot. 



Besides which, up to a comparatively recent date, there were 

 many comfortable, even stately residences dotted about Chiswick. 

 Incidentally I may mention that there were two manors in Chis- 

 wick, the Prebendal Manor of St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Dean's, 

 or Manor of Sutton. The Chapter of St. Paul's Cathedral had 

 prebendal rights in Chiswick which, by the way, are commemo- 

 rated in certain roads and terraces at the present day. These 

 rights they had to surrender in the revolutionary year of 1643, to 

 the Lord Mayor and citizens of London. Chaloner Chute, for a 

 short time Speaker of the House of Commons under Cromwell, 

 who is buried in a vault in Chiswick Church, lived at Sutton Court 

 (the Sutton Manor House), one of the finest of the old houses of the 

 district. His son-in-law, Barker, who resided in the neighbouring 

 Grove House, had taken up arms for the King, but remained on 

 good terms with his wife's family. At Sutton Court afterwards 

 dwelt Viscount Fauconberg, a son-in-law of Cromwell's, whose 

 wife, compared with her brother Richard, is said to have been the 

 better man of the two. Her husband actively worked for the 

 restoration of the Stuarts yet was one of those who invited over 



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