Briton

“ The Briton is a trinity composed of English, Irish and Scotch, a compound of the most stubborn vices and most sturdy virtues ever found in an organised society.
“Janus was not a Briton; the Briton has but one face, and it is always looking to the front. The Briton is sturdy, so he presses forward; he is weary, and he never runs; he is tenacious, and he appropriates everything having one loose end. ”

“ And where Britannia's banner waves, and her laws are paramount, and the honest, kindly Anglo-Saxon tongue is the language of the land, there surely needs no great effort of imagination for a Briton to think himself still at home, though a thousand leagues of ocean roll between him and his native isle. ”

“ He sees, too, how the people live a thoroughly characteristic life—that which consists in identification with everything that is national. No one is so unadaptive as the pure-bred Briton, and it has truly been said that an Englishman carries his country with him wherever he goes. ”

“ A Briton, even in love, should be
A subject, not a slave! ”

“ Britons of average powers of observation, with an intelligent knowledge of their own country and a sufficient one of others, know very well that Great Britain, whether in its wilder or its tamer aspects, resembles no other country in the least little bit, but is absolutely unique in almost every detail, natural and artificial, that goes to make a landscape. ”

“ Come, then, expressive silence, muse His praise.
[RULE, BRITANNIA] AN ODE: FROM ALFRED, A MASQUE When Britain first, at Heaven's command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!
Britons never will be slaves!
The nations not so blest as thee,
Must in their turns to tyrants fall,
Whilst thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all. ”

“ What race are we? Britons! Why, lads, the British over there aren’t as British as we are; They are English and Scotch and Irish and Welsh—but what are we? All these British strains mixed! Most of us have some Scotch blood and some English blood and some Irish blood mixed in our veins, many of us have been to other parts of Britain and got a touch of Canada, or Australia, or South Africa into us. I say lads we are more British than the folks in the Old Dart. We are a fine blend of all the flavours of different Britons, we are the very essence of Britain! We are epitomes of Empire. ”

“ Oh, the supreme delight of having one's arms and legs shot off to such soul-elevating sounds, to the tune of Rule Britannia, and somebody or other's march! "Britons strike home" thrills through the air, and you scarcely feel that you are spitted by a Polish lancer ”

“ The Britons are white in colour, strong of bodie, and full of bloud, as people inhabiting neere the north, and farre from the equinoctiall line, where the soile is not so fruitfull, and therefore the people not so feeble: whereas contrariwise such as dwell toward the course of the sunne, are lesse of stature, weaker of bodie, more nice, delicate, fearefull by nature, blacker in colour, & some so blacke in déed as anie crow or rauen. ”

“ Strictly speaking, there is nothing really and truly British; everybody and everything is a naturalised alien. Viewed as Britons, we all of us, human and animal, differ from one another simply in the length of time we and our ancestors have continuously inhabited this favoured and foggy isle of Britain. ”

“ History of the Britons 7Here beginneth the history of the Britons, edited by Mark the anchorite, a holy bishop of that people.
The island of Britain derives its name from Brutus, a Roman consul. Taken from the south-west point it inclines a little towards the west, and to its northern extremity measures eight hundred miles, and is in breadth two hundred. [4] It has also a vast many promontories, and castles innumerable, built of brick and stone. Its inhabitants consist of four different people; the Scots, the Picts, the Saxons, and the ancient Britons. ”

“ But now, few nations of the world but are a mixed seed; the people of England especially: the Britons, Picts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, by a wonderful providence of God, being become one English people. ”

“ Rule, Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves,
⁠Britons never shall be slaves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The working out of the idea of democracy in a country like England which still retained its monarchical form and much of its aristocratic flavor, was a theme on which he dwelt with particular pleasure. Back somewhere in the line of descent his paternal ancestors had been of English blood, and he was proud of the heroism, the spirit and the energy which had made Great Britain one of the mighty nations of the earth. ”

“ Setting aside England’s enormous and majestic politics, the country lives a life that is simultaneously material and mystical. In England matter is sovereign; and, let us add, it is sovereign in a useful and splendid way; names by which it is called include: bank, stock market, industry, commerce, production, circulation, exchange, wealth, prosperity; in England matter hampers progress wile goading it on; it is massive and tumultuous; it overwhelms a person and gains the upper hand; it fills him full of lead and covers him with wings; the wings are power, the lead is gold. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the same time England has a class to which we have happily no parallel in our country—a class to which even English gentlemen liken the Sepoys, and who would, they admit, under like circumstances be guilty of like enormities. But the true Englishman shuts his eyes for a great part of the time to the steps in the social scale down which his race descends, and looks only at the upper walks. ”

“ England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence, and tastes; and, to resist the tyranny and prepossession of the British element, a serious man must aid himself, by comparing with it the civilizations of the farthest east and west, the old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard, if only by means of the very impatience which English forms are sure to awaken in independent minds. ”

“ This, however, seems to have proceeded more from carelessness in that particular, than want of ability: for the following lines in his True Born Englishman, in which he makes Britannia rehearse the praises of her hero, King William, are harmoniously beautiful, and elegantly polished.
BRITANNIA. The fame of virtue 'tis for which I found,
And heroes with immortal triumphs crown'd.
Fame built on solid virtue swifter flies,
Than morning light can spread my eastern skies. ”

“ Either English, Scotch, Welsh or Irish, they know little else than that which they have derived from British sources. Taught from infancy to revere and play the sports of their native land, or the land of their fathers, and religiously believing that Great Britain is the greatest country on the face of the earth, they look, and quite naturally, it must be admitted, somewhat askance at innovations in that line emanating from other shores. ”

“ To the contemplative stranger who permits himself not only to talk sentimental nonsense, but to think it, it seems as if, somehow, all England had been gathered up into such a place—-as if nothing less than her glorious past, her wealth, her power, her honour, her uninvaded centuries, had been needed to produce it. ”

“ When an Englishman in England leaves office, no matter how unfaithful, though he be a friend of any country save his own, they send him to the House of Lords—or so I was told in France when I was there. ”

“ For by a singular destiny England, with a thousand years of noble history behind her, has chosen for her best-loved, for her national hero, not an Arminius from the age of legend, not a Henri Quatro from the age of chivalry, but a man whom men still living have seen and known. ”

“ The nobility, the clergy, the gentry, the literati, the professional classes, and then the people—after all, in England they are one; “shade unperceived and softening into shade,” and joined and knit together by habits, tastes, alliances, and interests, in a wonderful order. Much yet remains to be done, and will be done, to smooth down remaining asperities between rank and rank; but the British aristocracy may be said, even now, to be a genuine one, identified with everything great and good in the nation, and, on the whole, presenting a wholesome example to other classes in the State. ”

“ To us, we will own, nothing is so interesting and delightful as to contemplate the steps by which the England of the Domesday Book—the England of the Curfew and the Forest Laws—the England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs, outlaws—became the England which we know and love—the classic ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the mart of all trade. ”

“ They had not only a respect, but an affection for Great-Britain; for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce. Natives of Britain were always treated with particular regard; to be an Old England man was, of itself, a character of some respect, and gave a kind of rank among us. ”

“ In modern English history much of the greatness and glory of the country may be learned by noticing the names, characters, and exploits of the eminent persons who pass away from the theatre of life and action. So fruitful is the country in men of renown, and men who deserve renown, that to notice these is to see the mighty position which Great Britain occupies, and is likely to occupy, in the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The state of Britain was represented nearly always by a red-faced, purse-proud farmer with an enormous belly, that fine dream of freedom, the United States, by a cunning, lean-faced rascal in striped trousers and a blue coat. ”

“ And a hundred times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective purposes has returned to me. ”

“ INTRODUCTION ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The opening of the nineteenth century found England in the midst of a great foreign war, which for almost a generation absorbed the thought and energy of the nation, and postponed for the time the vital questions of economic and political reform which clamored for settlement. ”

“ If you were an impulsive, excitable, sentimental American and thought you were mildly rebuking your British friends when you ventured to wonder at the extraordinary naturalness of life in the West End, or at Walton Heath golf links, or at Chelsea football grounds, or at the Newmarket race-course, you found yourself unconsciously paying a tribute to "British character." ”

“ How more than English was all this! England had been growing away from and beyond Westminster Abbey, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox; but this Virginia Englishman, living alone in his woods, with his slaves and his overseers, severed from the progressive life of his race, was living still in the days when a pair of dissolute young orators could be deemed, and with some reason too, the most important persons in a great empire. ”

“ In the great Elizabethan age, when the English nation was finally hammered out, in the great eighteenth century when the British Empire was being built up everywhere, where in all these times, where was this symbolic stoical Englishman who dresses in drab and black and represses his feelings? ”

“ But, we say it with the gratification of Englishmen, proud of their country's fame, and still prouder of its principles—that the lead in this noblest of all human victories, has been clearly taken by England. It is she who pre-eminently stimulates the voyage, and plants the colony, and establishes the commerce, and civilizes the people. ”