Stray Studies from England and Italy

Twenty-two pieces, most of them reprinted from Macmillan’s Magazine and the Saturday Review, gathered in 1876 when Green was two years past the success of A Short History of the English People. The range is wide. He opens in his own East End parish of St. Philip’s, Stepney, with Edward Denison, the young reformer who settled among the poor there in 1867, then returns to English ground for the district visitor’s rounds, Lambeth and its archbishops, the early history of Oxford, and the England of the Angevin kings. The rest goes south: Cannes, San Remo, carnival on the Cornice, the Florence of Dante, Venice and Tintoretto, Capri and its Roman remains. Green wintered on the Riviera because consumption was taking him, and the sunlit pages carry that private urgency. A historian off duty, and good company.