Stray Studies from England and Italy

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 greatl...

But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home within his district that has not some memory left of the love and tenderness of his personal charity. I hardly like to tel...

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, t...

Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no history at all; it consists indeed only of a few petty streets streaming down the hill from the palace square. The palace, thoug...

The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic inroads from Corsica and Sardinia in the ninth century, to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed their walls. But before this time the...

The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not purpose to trace...

With the Reformation in its nobler and purer aspects Lambeth--as we have said--had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco, gathered there for a moment round Cranmer, but...

Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious pictures," the three Italian masterpiec...

It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the little faces that watch us as we thr...

The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buondelmonte, the betro...

The words were impatient, wilful enough; but it was the impatience of a man who frets at the blindness of others to what is clear and evident to his own finer sense. The shrewd,...

Prior John of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the abbot, was now in charge of the house, was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of s...

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 c...

Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet Æneas in the Elysian fields. But her...

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 kno...

It was hardly to be expected that the progress of religion and charitable feeling should fail to raise up formidable rivals to the District Visitor. To the more ecclesiastical m...

The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising of its burghers at the very moment...

But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to the archæologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site it strongly resembles Le Mans. T...

The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the call of the vinedressers; one lies on the...

Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the rise of the mother church of San Costa...