houses, lodges, and cottages, named, or not named, after the taste of their respective proprietors; one of which, on the left hand, some fourteen houses distant from the main Fulham Road, was for many years the residence of Mr. John Burke, whose laborious heraldic and genealogical inquiries induced him to arrange and publish various important collections relative to the peerage and family history of the United Kingdom, in which may be found, condensed for immediate reference, an immense mass of important information.

In Thistle Grove Mr. J. P. Warde, the well-known actor, died in 1840.

Immediately beyond Chelsea Park the village of Little CHELSEA commences, about the centre of which, and on the same side of the way, at the corner of the road leading to Battersea Bridge, stands the Goat in Boots public-house.

In 1663, there was a "house called the Goat at Little Chelsea," which, between that year and 1713, enjoyed the

right of commonage for two cows and one heifer upon Chelsea Heath.

How the Goat became equipped in boots, and the designation of the house changed, has been the subject of various conjectures; the most probable of which is, that it originates in a corruption of the latter part of the Dutch legend,―

66 MERCURIUS IS DER GODEN BOODE,"
(Mercury is the messenger of the gods,)

which being divided between each side of a sign bearing the figure of Mercury-a sign commonly used in the early part of the last century to denote that post-horses were to be obtained" der goden boode" became freely translated into English, "the goat in boots." To Le Blon is attributed the execution of this sign and its motto; but, whoever the original artist may have been, and the intermediate retouchers or repainters of the god, certain it is that the pencil of Morland, in accordance with the desire of the landlord, either transformed the petasus of Mercury into the horned head of a goat, his talaria into spurs upon boots of huge dimensions, and his caduceus into a cutlass, or thus decorated the original sign, thereby liquidating a score which he had run up here, without any other means of payment than what his pencil afforded. The sign, however, has been painted over, with considerable additional embellishments from gold leaf, so that not the least trace of Morland's work remains, except, perhaps, in the outline.

Park Walk (the road turning off at the Goat in Boots) proceeds to the King's Road, and, although not in a direct line, to Battersea Bridge. Opposite the Goat in Boots is

Gilston Road, leading to Boltons and St. Mary's Place. At No. 6, St. Mary's Place, resides J. O. Halliwell, F.R.S., F.S.A., the well-known Shaksperian scholar, whose varied contributions to literature have been crowned by the production of his folio edition of Shakspere-a work still in progress. At No. 8, Mr. Edward Wright, the popular actor, resided for a short time.

A few paces further on the main Fulham Road, at the north or opposite side, stood "Manor House," now termed Manor Hall, and occupied by St. Philip's Orphanage, a large, old-fashioned building, with the intervening space between it and the road screened in by boards, which were attached to the antique iron gate and railings about twenty years ago, when it became appropriated to a charitable asylum. Previously, Manor House had been a a ladies' boarding-school; and here Miss Bartolozzi, afterwards Madame Vestris, was educated.

SEYMOUR PLACE, which leads to Seymour Terrace, is a cul-de-sac on the same side of the main Fulham Road, between Manor Hall and the Somerset Arms public-house, which last forms the west corner of Seymour Place.

At No. 1, Seymour Terrace expired, on the 19th of June, 1824, in her twenty-fifth year, Madame Riego, the widow of the unfortunate patriot General Riego, "the restorer and martyr of Spanish freedom." Her short and eventful history possesses more than ordinary melancholy. While yet a child she had to endure all the hardships and privations consequent upon a state of warfare, and under the protection of her maternal grandfather, had to seek refuge from place to place on the mountains of Asturias from the

French army. At the close of 1821 she was married to General Riego, to whom she had been known and attached almost from infancy, and, in the spring of the following year, became, with her distinguished husband, a resident in Madrid. But the political confusion and continued alarm of the period having appeared to affect her health, the general proceeded with her in the autumn to Granada, where he parted from his young and beloved wife, never again to meet her in this world, the convocation of the extraordinary Cortes for October 1822 obliging him to return to the capital.

Accompanied by the canon Riego, brother to her husband, and her attached sister, Donna Lucie, she removed in March to Malaga, from whence the advance of the French army into the south of Spain obliged them to seek protection at Gibraltar, which, under the advice of General Riego, they left for England on the 4th of July, but, owing to an unfavourable passage, did not reach London until the 17th of August. Here the visitation which impended over her was still more calamitous than all that had preceded it. Within little more than two months after her arrival in London, the account arrived of General Riego's execution.*

Gerald Griffin, the Irish novelist, in a letter dated 22nd of November, 1823, says,

66

I have been lately negociating with my host (of 76 Regent Street) for lodgings for the widow and brother of poor General Riego. They

* Riego was executed, on the 7th of October, 1823, at Madrid, with every mark of ignominy.

G

are splendid apartments, but the affair has been broken off by the account of his death. It has been concealed from her. She is a young woman, and is following him fast, being far advanced in a consumption. His brother is in deep grief. He says he will go and bury himself for the remainder of his days in the woods of America." The house,

No. 1, SEYMOUR PLACE,

as it was then, Seymour Terrace, Little Chelsea, as it is now called, became, about this period, the residence of the unhappy fugitives. Griffin, who appears to have made their acquaintance through a Spanish gentleman, named Valentine Llanos, writes, in February, 1824,

"I was introduced the other day to poor Madame Riego, the relict of the unfortunate general. I was surprised to see her look much better than I was prepared to expect, as she is in a confirmed consumption."

Mental grief, which death only could terminate, had at that moment "marked" Madame Riego "for his own;" yet her look, like that of all high-minded Spaniards, to a stranger was calm-" much better than he was prepared to expect."

On the 18th of May, exactly one month and a day before the termination of her sufferings, Griffin says,

The canon Riego, brother to the poor martyr, sent me, the other day, a Spanish poem of many cantos, having for its subject the career