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 errand