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, 7.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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