British English

“ Politics took the place of honor among the gentlemen, their range embracing not only State and national politics, but British as well, as to which they possessed astonishing knowledge, interest in English matters having been handed down from father to son as a class test. ”

“ I not only hear the voice of England in the language of this people, but I recognise in all their best qualities, their industry, their honesty, their sturdy independence of spirit, the very witnesses of their origin—they are English; no other people in the world would have licked us as they did; nor any other people in the world built up, upon the ground they won, so sound, and strong, and fair an edifice. ”

“ When the intelligence reached England, that the nation whose tongue was classic, whose statuary was regarded with despairing wonder, whose records formed one of the finest pages of history, was, after centuries of subjugation, striving to obtain freedom, a genuine enthusiasm pervaded English society. ”

“ Even the national temper was fully formed. Civilization, letters, science, religion itself, have done little to change the inner mood of Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the fight, that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent awe of the mysteries of life and death which lay deep in English souls then as now, passed with Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won. ”

“ When I once went to the length of adding that each Englishman should be muscle fit and ready in case of England’s sudden need, I saw the lads grin cheerfully at the thought of England in any such un-English plight. ”

“ The narrow- minded would ascribe all that was attempted to the grasping propensity of the English. But the motives that actuate many in England, both in public and private life, are much more noble than the world gives them credit for. ”

“ The freedom of England, which is the parent of its greatness in all ways, is as old in the race as fear of God and love of peril; and, through its manifold and primary operation in English nurture, is the true continuer of its literature. ”

“ In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their home and their trade, of their sturdy battle with oppression, their steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom. ”

“ They are extremely instructive for the internal relations of English society. They show wide observation and calm wisdom, and, like his philosophical works, are a treasure for the English nation, whose views of life have been built upon them. ”

“ For the good that we can do.
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Find here not one ill word for brave old England; my first, best friends were English. But for her policy, her politicians, her speculators, what man with a heart in him can but hate and abhor them? ”

“ You think because I see some spots on the sun of the English character, I don't love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the English tongue, and boasts one drop of English blood in his veins, not be proud of England? England, the mother of poets and thinkers; England, that gave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer; England, that holds in her lap Oxford, Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather and pine-wood! Are we hewn out of granite, to be cold before England? ”

“ Do you know at all what English country-life is, which the English praise so, and 'moralize upon into a thousand similes,' as that one greatest, purest, noblest thing in the world—the purely English and excellent thing? ”

“ You are the nation which eats other nations—a magnificent function! This suction of the world makes England preeminent. As politicians and philosophers, in the management of colonies, populations, and industry, and in the desire to do others any harm which may turn to your own good, you stand alone. The hour will come when two boards will be put up on earth—inscribed on one side, Men; on the other, Englishmen. I mention this to your glory, I, who am neither English nor human, having the honour to be a bear. Still more—I am a doctor. ”

“ For in our literature, which is but our voice as a people, the mind speaks, that has so laboured as to win for England, almost alone among the nations, the inheritance of an inalienable freedom.”—English Writers from Chaucer to Dunbar. ”

“ A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into their society with manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in the race of honor and influence. ”

“ I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about English superiority which I should reject indignantly were the application bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to believe the scenery of England, the poetry of England, even the decoration and music of England, in some mystic and impregnable way, the best. This habit of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly those in which one has a personal interest, is in the very constitution of man's mind. ”

“ And we know that only the winged words live on, the words that are intelligible to the whole of mankind, that appeal to the whole of humanity, to the common human mind, the common heart.
We know the vast power of the English word. We know what a marvellous contribution the English writers have made to the life not of England alone, but to that of the whole world, the whole humanity. ”

“ When, in the eighth and ninth centuries, we begin to see a little into the darkness, we find that England has become a purely English country, with a purely English and rather absurd system of law, and a purely English language ”

“ How gladly enlist the wise, thoughtful, efficient pens and voices of England! We want England and Europe to hold our people stanch to their best tendency. Are English of this day incapable of a great sentiment? ”

“ I much prefer the condition of an English gentleman of the better class, to that of any potentate in Europe,--whether for travel, or for opportunity of society, or for access to means of science or study, or for mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at home.
Such, as we have seen, is the wealth of England, a mighty mass, and made good in whatever details we care to explore. The cause and spring of it is the wealth of temperament in the people. The wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as themselves ”

“ Upon all topics we are accustomed to think, perhaps, with more latitude, religion, politics, morals, everything. I like the English extremely, even more than I expected, and yet happy am I to think that our own best portions of society can bear a comparison with theirs. ”

“ The growing consciousness in the people at large of a new greatness, its instinctive prevision of the coming of a time when England was to play a foremost part in the history of the world, the upgrowth of a nobler and loftier temper which should correspond to such a destiny, all were alike unintelligible to him. ”

“ For the first time in one's experience one had experienced a genuine, whole-hearted, common feeling running through all the English people—every man, woman and child, without distinction, bound in one common interest which, for the time being, was moving the whole nation. ”

“ This political stability has been a tremendous factor in the formation of English character, has given the Englishman of all ranks a certain deep, quiet sense of form and order, an ingrained culture which makes no show, being in the bones of the man as it were. ”

“ But if you Foretell, or Prophesy, or Predict that the War will have an End, or Close, or Termination that shall not only be Speedy, or Rapid, or Accelerated, but also Great, or Grand, or Magnificent, you may perhaps Stir, or Move, or Actuate him to have Ruth, or Pity, or Compassion on your Mate, or Colleague, or Collaborator. The English language, then, is a language of great wealth—much greater wealth than can be illustrated by any brief example. But wealth is nothing unless you can use it. The real strength of English lies in the inspired freedom and variety of its syntax. ”

“ Their traditional faith in compromise, their traditional dread of ideas, their traditional habit of acting first and reasoning afterwards, has made the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency—just as it has made the best English social type a gentleman, but a gentleman absolutely conditioned, tempered, and supplemented by a flunky. ”

“ But perfectly satisfied of his position, and with his duties clearly defined, he could allow large and increasing play, in the leisure of advancing age, to his natural sympathies, and to the effect of the wonderful spectacle of the world around him. He was, after all, an Englishman; and with all his quickness to detect and denounce what was selfish and poor in English ideas and action, and with all the strength of his deep antipathies, his chief interests were for things English—English literature, English social life, English politics, English religion. ”

“ While a popular French author sums up the elements of life in England as being la vie de famille, la politique, et les affaires,—'domestic life, politics, and business,'—he complacently infers that le fond du caractère Anglais, 'the basis of the English character,' is nothing more nor less than le manque de bonheur—'a want of anything like happiness.' An English thinker, on the other hand, finds in the very language of France the evidence of superficial emotion and unaspiring, irreverent intelligence. ”

“ Every real improvement in the character of the English, whether it consist in giving them higher aspirations, or only a juster estimate of the value of their present objects of desire, must necessarily moderate the ardour of their devotion to the pursuit of wealth. ”

“ But above all let us not be influenced by any angry feelings, so far as to shut our eyes to the perception of what is really excellent and amiable in the English character. We are a young people, necessarily an imitative one, and must take our examples and models, in a great degree, from the existing nations of Europe. There is no country more worthy of our study than England. ”

“ It was then that the moral, the philanthropic, the religious ideas which have moulded English society into its present shape first broke the spiritual torpor of the eighteenth century. It was then that with the wider diffusion of intelligence our literature woke to a nobler and larger life which fitted it to become the mouthpiece of every national emotion. ”

“ It has been doubted by military historians if any enemy have ever stood a charge with the bayonet, but here the bayonet was often the only weapon employed in conflicts of the most obstinate and deadly character. Not only did the English charge in vain, not only were desperate encounters between masses of men maintained with the bayonet alone, but they were obliged to resist bayonet to bayonet, with the Russian infantry again and again, as they charged the British with incredible fury and determination. ”

“ With wonder and veneration, have we watched the English people, that combines the greatest idealism with the most marvellous creative genius, that constantly transforms words into deeds, aspirations into actions, thoughts and feelings into institutions, go onward, from step to step, reaching out into the heavens, yet never relinquishing the earth, higher and higher along its triumphant road, still onward in its work of creating the life of England. ”

“ He becomes part of England of the past and of the future—part of the spiritual heritage for which Englishmen have in the past shown themselves willing to die part of the English ideal, towards which the best of Englishmen aim to live. ”

“ Five or six hundred years ago it was as well known to the English as any spot on the globe to which they adventured for trade or pleasure; and at this present time the advent of an Englishman is so rare in the place that, when such an apparition appears, the worthy people collect at their shop-doors to gaze at him, and the little children gather about him with gaping eyes, and examine him from head to foot, with an expression of mixed curiosity and fear. ”

“ The New English permit not their brethren of Old England to enjoy their consciences, lest their own numbers might exceed their own, or at least the greatness of their own assemblies and maintenances decrease. ”

“ They, too, prepared for combat; and, when the loud booming of the guns gave the signal that the battle was commenced, eighty cannon opened their destructive fire, and the light troops went sweeping onward with the rapidity of a thunder-cloud over the heavens, while the deep, dark columns marched sternly after, and charged, with terrible strength, the English lines. ”

“ In that greatest period of the race we do not know which is the greater, the daring energy, the enthusiastic impetuosity, the ability to govern, that the English then displayed, or the mighty sweep and range of the imagination as nobly revealed in their poetry. The works of the Elizabethan writers are with us, like the memory of the deeds of the Elizabethan adventurers, as evidence, if any was needful, that the peoples that speak English are of a truth poetic, that they are not prosaic. ”

“ One may easily challenge such a definition, which, like most others, is far from faultless. It is difficult, for example, to draw the line sharply between instructive and pleasure-giving works; for many an instructive book of history gives us pleasure, and there may be more instruction on important matters in a pleasurable poem than in a treatise on ethics. Again, there are historians who allege that English literature must include not simply the works of Britain but everything written in the English language. ”