24 chapters
7 hour read
Selected Chapters
24 chapters
PREFACE.
PREFACE.
I have to thank the Editors of Macmillan's Magazine and the Saturday Review for allowing me to reprint most of the papers in this series. In many cases however I have greatly changed their original form. A few pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short History.'...
1 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
A BROTHER OF THE POOR.
A BROTHER OF THE POOR.
There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I tu
25 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.
I. CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.
In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England, but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles or along the b
12 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.
II. CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE.
Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no doubt, commonplace enough to those who have seen its glories in Rome—the crowded Corso, the rush of the maddened horses, the firefly twinklings of the Maccoletti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants laughing in the sunshine, a few children scrambling for bonbons, form an almost ridiculous contrast to the gorgeous outburst of revelry and colour that ushers in Lent at the capital. But there are some people after all who still find a
14 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA.
III. TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA.
The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from the mountain road which leads to Turbia, is unquestionably the most picturesque among all the views of the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a last look as far as the hills above San Remo, headland after headland running out into blue water, white little towns nestling in the depth of sunny bays or clinging to the brown hill-side, villas peeping white from the dark olive masses, sails gleaming white against the purple sea. The brill
11 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
IV. THE WINTER RETREAT.
IV. THE WINTER RETREAT.
It is odd, when one is safely anchored in a winter refuge to look back at the terrors and reluctance with which one first faced the sentence of exile. Even if sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold winds, the icy showers, the fogs we leave behind us, give perhaps a zest not wholly its own to Italian sunshine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth and colour sends a strange shock of pleasure through every nerve. The flinging o
7 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
V. SAN REMO.
V. SAN REMO.
San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to become the most popular of all the health resorts of the Riviera. At no other point along the coast is the climate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose of the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brighton-like gaiety of Nizza or Cannes; even Mentone looks down with an air of fashionable superiority on a rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose municipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of quiet and sunshine the p
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE POETRY OF WEALTH.
THE POETRY OF WEALTH.
There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into oblivion, the sight of Château d'If as it rises glowing from the blue waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder which it excites
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.
LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS.
A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the terrace an
56 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CHILDREN BY THE SEA.
CHILDREN BY THE SEA.
Autumn brings its congresses—scientific, ecclesiastical, archæological—but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their smoke-trail in the offing and wa
11 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.
THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.
The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth century—the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space. Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce. Cimabue revolutionized painting, and
15 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
BUTTERCUPS.
BUTTERCUPS.
It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that they give us our buttercups back again. Few faces have stirred us with a keener touch of pity through the whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs, a face mutinous in revolt against its imprisonment in brick and mortar, dull with the boredom of the schoolroom, weary of the formal walk, the monotonous drive, the inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual round of lessons
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
ABBOT AND TOWN.
ABBOT AND TOWN.
The genius of a great writer of our own days has made Abbot Sampson of St. Edmunds the most familiar of mediæval names to the bulk of Englishmen. By a rare accident the figure of the silent, industrious Norfolk monk who at the close of Henry the Second's reign suddenly found himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not the greatest, of English abbeys starts out distinct from the dim canvas of the annals of his house. Annals indeed in any strict sense St. Edmunds has none; no national chronicle was ev
26 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.
HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.
When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German students
12 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
ÆNEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY.
ÆNEAS: A VERGILIAN STUDY.
In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the Iliad
27 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
I. VENICE AND ROME.
I. VENICE AND ROME.
It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy lazzi and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of brown se
10 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO.
II. VENICE AND TINTORETTO.
The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cambray, but her victory over the crowd of her assailants was followed by half a century of peace and glory such as she had never known. Her losses on the mainland were in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessation of that policy of Italian aggression which had eaten like a canker into the resources of the State and drawn her from her natural career of commerce and aggrandizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice became less, her po
10 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE DISTRICT VISITOR.
THE DISTRICT VISITOR.
It would be hard to define exactly the office and duties of the District Visitor. Historically she is the direct result of the Evangelical movement which marked the beginning of this century; the descendant of the "devout women not a few" who played, like Hannah More, the part of mothers in Israel to the Simeons and Wilberforces of the time. But the mere tract-distributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial and ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The District Visitor of to-d
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD.
To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor of Oxford, the town seems a mere offshoot of the University. Its appearance is altogether modern; it presents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity with the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An isolated church here and there tells a different tale; but the largest of its parish churches is best known as the church of the University, and the church of St. Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless observer some idea of the tow
25 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.
THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.
For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is, besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne. The
19 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CAPRI. I.
CAPRI. I.
We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful. Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the continent
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. II.
CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. II.
Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck. Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of débris that brings home to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which linked togeth
16 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.
THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.
The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the summer gl
9 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
With Coloured Maps, Genealogical Tables, and Chronological Annals. Crown 8vo., price 8s. 6d. MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
With Coloured Maps, Genealogical Tables, and Chronological Annals. Crown 8vo., price 8s. 6d. MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.
"I thank you very much for sending me Mr. Green's book. I have read it with genuine admiration. It bears marks of great ability in many ways. There is a vast amount of research, great skill in handling and arranging the facts, a very pleasant and taking style, but chief of all a remarkable grasp of the subject—many-sided as it is in its unity and integrity—which makes it a work of real historical genius. I am sure I wish it all the success it deserves; and you are quite at liberty to give my opi
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter