And it is the great men and they alone that can render a place sacred.  Chelsea is now to the lovers of the Beautiful a sacred name, a sacred soil; a place of pilgrimage where certain gods of Art once lived, and loved, and worked, and died.

Sir Thomas More lived here and had for a frequent guest Erasmus.  Hans Sloane began in Chelsea the collection of curiosities which has now developed into the British Museum.  Bishop Atterbury (who claimed that Dryden was a greater poet than Shakespeare), Dean Swift and Doctor Arbuthnot, all lived in Church Street; Richard Steele just around the corner and Leigh Hunt in Cheyne Row; but it was from another name that the little street was to be immortalized.

If France constantly has forty Immortals in the flesh, surely it is a modest claim to say that Chelsea has three for all time:  Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot and Joseph Mallord William Turner.

Turner’s father was a barber.  His youth was passed in poverty and his advantages for education were very slight.  And all this in the crowded city of London, where merit may knock long and still not be heard, and in a country where wealth and title count for much.

When a boy, barefoot and ragged, he would wander away alone on the banks of the river and dream dreams about wonderful palaces and beautiful scenes; and then he would trace with a stick in the sands, endeavoring, with mud, to make plain to the eye the things that his soul saw.

His mother was quite sure that no good could come from this vagabondish nature, and she did not spare the rod, for she feared that the desire to scrawl and daub would spoil the child.  But he was a stubborn lad, with a pug-nose and big, dreamy, wondering eyes, and a heavy jaw; and when parents see that they have such a son, they had better hang up the rod behind the kitchen-door and lay aside force and cease scolding.  For love is better than a cat-o’-nine-tails, and sympathy saves more souls than threats.

The elder Turner considered that the proper use of a brush was to lather chins.  But the boy thought differently, and once surreptitiously took one of his father’s brushes to paint a picture; the brush on being returned to its cup was used the next day upon a worthy haberdasher, whose cheeks were shortly colored a vermilion that matched his nose.  This lost the barber a customer and secured the boy a thrashing.

Young Turner did not always wash his father’s shop-windows well, nor sweep off the sidewalk properly.  Like all boys he would rather work for some one else than for “his folks.”

He used to run errands for an engraver by the name of Smith—­John Raphael Smith.  Once, when Smith sent the barber’s boy with a letter to a certain art-gallery with orders to “get the answer and hurry back, mind you!” the boy forgot to get the answer and to hurry back.  Then another boy was dispatched after the first, and boy Number Two found boy Number One sitting, with staring eyes and open mouth, in the art-gallery before a painting of Claude Lorraine’s.  When boy Number One was at last forcibly dragged away, and reached the shop of his master, he got his ears well cuffed for his forgetfulness.  But from that day forth he was not the same being that he had been before his eyes fell on that Claude Lorraine.