Europe Books

HOW WE GOT TO JOHN O' GROAT'S Thursday, September 7th. It was one o'clock in the morning when we started on the three-mile walk to Warrington, where we were to join the 2.18 a.m. train for Glasgow, and it was nearly ten o'clock when we reached that town, the train being one hour and twenty minutes late. This delay caused us to be too late for the steamboat by which we intended to... more...

CHAPTER ONE FIRST IMPRESSIONS Two eager young Americans sat, one on each side of the window of an English train, speeding towards London. They had landed only that morning, and everything seemed very strange to them, as they watched the pretty scenes from the car-window. The lady who had met them at the steamer, was an old friend of the family, who had often been to America, and was well known to the... more...

After one has left a country it is interesting to collect together the emotions it has given in an effort to define its particular character. And with Andalusia the attempt is especially fascinating, for it is a land of contrasts in which work upon one another, diversely, a hundred influences. In London now, as I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the sky is leaden and cold, the houses in... more...

PREFACE "Beyond doubt the finished historian must be a traveller: he must see with his own eyes the true look of a wide land; he must see, too, with his eyes the very spots where great events happened; he must mark the lie of a city, and take in, as far as a non-technical eye can, all that is special about a battle-field." So wrote Mr. Freeman in his Methods of Historical Study, and he... more...

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION Instructed in the autumn of 1912 to join the Bulgarian army, then mobilising for war against Turkey, as war correspondent for the London Morning Post, I made my preparations with the thought uppermost that I was going to a cut-throat country where massacre was the national sport and human life was regarded with no sentimental degree of respect. The Bulgarians, a generation ago,... more...

PRAISE OF THIS BOOK To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book, and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit), greeting--and whatever else can be had for nothing. If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them... more...

INTRODUCTION. Arthur Young was born in 1741, the son of a clergyman, at Bradfield, in Suffolk.  He was apprenticed to a merchant at Lynn, but his activity of mind caused him to be busy over many questions of the day.  He wrote when he was seventeen a pamphlet on American politics, for which a publisher paid him with ten pounds’ worth of books.  He started a periodical, which ran to six numbers. ... more...

When I first indulged the inclination, which I had long entertained, of visiting the famous castle of Chinon, and the equally interesting abbey of Fontevraud—the palace and tomb of our English kings—and paused on my way in "the lovely vales of Vire," and gathered in romantic Brittany some of her pathetic legends, I thought I should have satisfied my longing to explore France; but I found... more...

INTRODUCTION THE MANUSCRIPTS There are here printed two manuscripts by Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall, and portions of another. The first[1] is a kind of journal, though it was not written up day by day, containing a narrative of his journey to France and his residence at Orleans and Poictiers, when he was sent abroad by his father at the age of nineteen to study law in foreign schools in... more...

I was brought up in Rome, from the age of twelve to that of seventeen, but did not return there for many years afterwards. I discovered it anew for myself, while knowing all its sites and its details; discovered, that is to say, its meaning to my thoughts and feelings. Hence, in all my impressions, a mixture of familiarity and of astonishment; a sense, perhaps answering to the reality, that Rome—it... more...