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 greatly changed their original form. A few pages will be found to repeat what I have already said in my 'Short History.' CONTENTS PAGE A Brother of the Poor. 1 Sketches in Sunshine:— I. Cannes and St. Honorat 31 II. Carnival on the Cornice 44 III. Two Pirate Towns of the Riviera 59 IV. The Winter Retreat 71 V. San Remo 79 The Poetry of Wealth 93 Lambeth and the Archbishops 107 Children by the Sea 167 The Florence of Dante 181 Buttercups 198 Abbot and Town 211 Hotels in the Clouds 241 AEneas: A Vergilian Study 257 Two Venetian Studies :— I. Venice and Rome 289 II. Venice and Tintoretto 300 The District Visitor 313 The Early History of Oxford 329 The Home of Our Angevin Kings 359 Capri 383 Capri and its Roman Remains 395 The Feast of the Coral-Fishers 414 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 turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another, "with a ragged edge." It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and degradation of "the East-end,"—that "London without London," as some one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border which parts the City from their weltering mass…