Old Chelsea, by Benjamin Ellis Martin (T. Fisher Unwin), is
emphatically a pretty book,—pretty in the spirit in which it is written, pretty in its vivid and yet idealising if not idealistic illustrations, which are executed by Mr. Joseph Pennell, and pretty in its general appearance and "get-up." Old Chelsea is familiar to most of its as the possibly not impregnable citadel of that old London the disappearance of whose quaintnesses is to be regretted ; but it is positively wonderful what an intelligent observer like Mr. Martin can discover in the way of treasures new and old, and in the course of what he styles "a summer- day's stroll." Catherine Parr and Lady Jane Grey, Don Salter° and Colonel Esmond, Sir Thomas More and Pepys, Carlyle and Thackeray, Turner and Henry Kingsley, live once more in these pages. Mr. Martin, although he is no mere laudator temporis acti, has no admiration for the "ambitions artificiality" of Tit,e Street, "the smug gardens" of the Embankment, or the insolent affectations of the Queen Anne mania which stare stonily down on Cheyne Walk ;" and it is to be hoped that there are many other Americans who take the same view as Mr. Martin, and can write as he occasionally writes, in the vein of the late Richard Jefferies. One or two of Mr. Martin's fanciful sketches, as of the Thames in the old days, with its "fairy flotilla," are thoroughly successful in all respects. Altogether, these "vagrant fancies" constitute as pleasant a book upon London as has recently been published.
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