ncarcerated for small debts occupied his
thoughts and energies, and he worked to ameliorate it. He left his son
James Neild an immense fortune. This eccentric individual, however, was
a miser, who scrimped and scraped all his life, and at his death left all
his money to Queen Victoria. The gate-piers before this house are very
fine, tall, and square, of mellowed red brick, surmounted by vases. These
vases superseded the stone balls in fashion at the end of the Jacobean
period. Hogarth is said to have been a frequent visitor to this house. In
the sixth house Dr. Weedon Butler, father of the Headmaster of Harrow,
kept a school, which was very well known for about thirty years. In the
next block we have the famous Queen's House, marked by the little
statuette of Mercury on the parapet. It is supposed to have been named
after Catherine of Braganza, but beyond some initials--C. R. (Catherine
Regina)--in the ironwork of the gate, there seems no fact in support of
this. The two Rossettis, Meredith, and Swinburne came here in 1862, but
soon parted company, and D. G. Rossetti alone remained. He decorated some
of the fireplaces with tiles himself; that in the drawing-room is still
inlaid with glazed blue and white Persian tiles of old design. In his
time it was called Tudor House, but when the Rev. H. R. Haweis (d. 1901)
came to live here, he resumed the older name of Queen's House. It is
supposed to have been built by Wren, and the rooms are beautifully
proportioned, panelled, and of great height.

The next house to this on the eastern side was occupied for many years by
the artistic family of the Lawsons. Thomas Attwood, a pupil of Mozart and
himself a great composer, died there in 1838. The house had formerly a
magnificent garden, to the mulberries of which Hazlitt makes allusion in
one of his essays. No. 18 was the home of the famous Don Saltero's
museum. This man, correctly Salter, was a servant of Sir Hans Sloane, and
his collection was formed from the overflowings of his master's. Some of
the curiosities dispersed by the sale in 1799 are still to be seen in the
houses of Chelsea families in the form of petrified seaweed and shells.
The museum was to attract people to the building, which was also a
coffee-house; this was at that time something of a novelty. It was first
opened in 1695. Sir Richard Steele, in the _Tatler_, says: "When I came
into the coffee-house I had not time to salute the company before my eye
was diverted