"Insular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opposition generally. The Whig Party favored the system. In the session of 1842 or 1843 citizens of Nantucket presented a petition for an Act of Incorporation as a "Camel Company." The town had been the chief port in the world for the whale-fishery business. Its insular position rendered it necessary to obtain supplies from the mainland and to transport the products of the fishery to the mainland. The fact that there was a bar across the harbor, which made it impossible to bring in vessels of the size of those engaged in the fishery was ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... millions at the present time. They pride themselves upon the fact that they have maintained their national entity since the Ninth Century, although they have stood alone and exposed in the middle of Europe, without any of the geographical advantages which accrue from a situation of insular isolation such as has been enjoyed ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... Earl of Argyle gives a picturesque account of an embassy from 'the great M'Neil of Barra', as that insular chief used to be denominated. 'I received a letter yesterday from M'Neil of Barra, who lives very far off, sent by a gentleman in all formality, offering his service, which had made you laugh to see his entry. His style of his letter runs as if he were of another kingdom' (p. 643).] Dr Johnson ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... success, made war upon all foreigners. At length the excitement subsided, but too much damage to foreign lives and property had been done to be ignored, and the matter had an ugly look, especially as no Spaniard had suffered by this outbreak. The Insular government roused itself to punish some of the minor misdoers and made many explanations and apologies, but the aggrieved nations insisted, and obtained as compensation a greater security for foreigners and ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... Uluka which kindled the wrath (of the Pandavas). The next that comes, you must know, is the story of Amba. Then comes the thrilling story of the installation of Bhishma as commander-in-chief. The next is called the creation of the insular region Jambu; then Bhumi; then the account about the formation of islands. Then comes the 'Bhagavat-gita'; and then the death of Bhishma. Then the installation of Drona; then the destruction of the 'Sansaptakas'. Then ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... more and more insular even about our continental conquests; we stood upon our island as if on an anchored ship. We never thought of Nelson at Naples, but only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish name we managed to pronounce ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... asked, if he was so insular in his ideas, why had he taken an American wife, and she a widow? He had been charmed by her vivacity. She lifted him out of the gloom in which he had lived so long. If she had been tame and prosaic, she would have worn the weeds of widowhood again ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... Catwhisker was backing out of the narrow harbor with Cub and his father aboard and Bud and Hal on shore watching their departure. Presently the yacht was out of sight from their hemmed-in position, the view being obstructed by trees and tall bushes on an intervening isle, which constituted a link of the insular chain that surrounded ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... city mentioned, is associated with Tyre both in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna and in the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings. It seems to have been the Palaetyros or "Older Tyre" of classical tradition, which stood on the mainland opposite the more famous insular Tyre. Phoenician tradition ascribes its foundation to Usoos, the offspring of the mountains of Kasios and Lebanon, and brother of Memrumus, "the exalted," and Hypsouranios, "the lord of heaven," who was the first to invent a clothing of skins, and to sail upon the water in boats, ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... of circumstances, Haigh and I were in the way of finding ourselves in no slight difficulties. The Briton in his own insular ports is a very slipshod person with regard to the papers of small craft—especially pleasure craft. He looks upon those last with a favourable eye, and watches their going and coming with small concern. The peoples of the Mediterranean are constructed in different ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... States is to all intents an insular power, like Great Britain. We have but two land frontiers, Canada and Mexico. The latter is hopelessly inferior to us in all the elements of military strength. As regards Canada, Great Britain maintains a standing army; but, like our ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... speculator sends his money abroad at all, he goes wild altogether. He rushes at obscure transactions, and lends to Peru, or Guatemala, or Tierra del Fuego, or some shaky place he knows nothing about. The insular maniac overlooks the continent of Europe, instead of studying it, and seeking what countries there are safe and others risky. Now, why overlook Prussia? It is a country much better governed than England, especially as regards great public enterprises and monopolies. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... features twitched when he was disturbed, but were beautiful when he smiled. To a profound observer he looked dangerous. He had the faculty of making his face signify nothing at all. He had been begotten an insular Italian, but was born a Frenchman. His wife, a Creole, more than six years older than he, was in the box with him. She sat at the front, and was seen by thousands. She wished to be seen; and when the pit shouted in the direction of the box she smiled a little smile, with ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... outlaws, whilst those who had a greater love for home, or property at stake, remained within the prescribed limits, in discontented, sullen compliance with the inevitable. The system interrupted the people's usual occupations, retarded agriculture, and produced general dissatisfaction. The Insular Government then had recourse to an extreme measure which practically implied the imposition of compulsory military service on every male American, foreign, or native inhabitant between the ages of eighteen ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... walnut, oaks, and laurels. Hooker, when he subsequently visited the Khasia Hills in Assam, said that though the subtropical scenery on the outer Himalaya was on a much more gigantic scale, it was not comparable in beauty and luxuriance with the really tropical vegetation induced by the hot, damp, and insular climate of those perennially humid Khasia Hills. The forest of gigantic trees on the Himalaya, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark grey foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet high. Whereas in the Khasia Hills the individual trees are smaller, more varied in kind, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... laughed outright. Trained in the wider, more open-air school of Canadian life, he found her insular ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... gathered on deck, and found that I was the only foreigner among them. Almost without exception they were native Majorcans, returning from trips of business or pleasure to the Continent. They spoke no language except Spanish and Catalan, and held fast to all the little habits and fashions of their insular life. If anything more had been needed to show me that I was entering upon untrodden territory, it was supplied by the joyous surprise of the steward when I gave him a fee. This fact reconciled me to my isolation on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... of the Napoleonic epoch, when the causes which drew together the western half of the continent operated powerfully to exclude our own country from the current influences of the time, and made the England of 1815, in opinion, in religion, and in taste much more insular than the England of 1780. The revolution which overthrew Charles X. did no doubt encourage and stimulate the party of Reform in Great Britain; but, unlike the Belgian, the German, and the Italian movements, the English Reform movement would unquestionably have run the same course and achieved ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the chaos of thoughts that had assailed us on the reception of the bad news, was the necessity of engaging an English medical man. But at the first sight of the French doctor, as, clad in a long overall of white cotton, he entered the sick-room, our insular prejudice vanished, ousted by complete confidence; a confidence that our future experience of his professional skill ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... Great Britain stands at the head of all European nations. Its abundant mineral wealth, especially in coal and iron, has stimulated manufactures to the highest degree, while its insular character and numerous seaports have had a similar stimulating effect upon commerce. Its revenue, aside from that of the colonies, amounts to about $920,000,000 annually, and its public debt reaches ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... decidedly comic about it; as if Caesar's "Et tu, Brute," might be translated, "What, you here?" But in one respect the fable is quite as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in all our speech there ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... exaggerated my rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that corner of the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London as a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim. The Marble Arch itself, in its new insular position, with traffic turning dizzily all about it, struck me as a placid monstrosity. What could be wilder than to have a huge arched gateway, with people going everywhere except under it? If I took down my front door and stood it up all by itself in the middle ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... tap-roots of his emotions striking deep into politics and philosophy, is only an extreme instance of a national trait, which was unusually prominent in the early part of the nineteenth century owing to the state of our insular politics at the time though it must be admitted that English artists of all periods have an inherent tendency to moralise which has sometimes been a weakness, and sometimes has ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... disturbance of his ordinary suave and well-bred equanimity that the Italian received the information that he need apprehend no obstacle to his suit from the insular prejudices or the worldly views of the lady's family. Not that he was mean and cowardly enough to recoil from the near and unclouded prospect of that felicity which he had left off his glasses to behold ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as though taking in an inconceivable idea, while he held her fixed with a steady gaze which lost none of its firmness by being both good-humored and highly amused. Finally, reluctantly, she admitted, "Yes, I see. You mean I'm insular." ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Latin, merely to talk to each other; yet so it was in Skye." The acquisition of this branch of learning was not, indeed, expensive. Latin was taught for two shillings and sixpence the quarter, and English and writing for one shilling. Indeed it is scarcely more now. The people seldom quitted their insular homes, except when on service; and, to the silence of their wild secluded scenes, the romance of poetry and the composition of song gave ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... easy or a popular task. National rivalry was apt to break out, and it was hard for the judges to escape the imputation of partiality. Nor did the English, it must be admitted, return from the field in much good humor. With a feeling of complacency engendered by their insular position and their long isolation from the Continent, they had been wont to consider themselves as far superior to the French in all exercises of strength and agility. The French knights had shown themselves fully equal to their English opponents; the French King was not inferior ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... had received a mathematical education. I was much interested with some quotations from Lyell's Elements in a late Calcutta Courier, especially about the Marine Saurian from the Gallepagos. What further proof can be wanted of the maritime and insular nature of the world during the reigns of the Saurian reptiles? What more conclusive can be expected about the appearance of new species? This point would at once be settled if the formation of these islands can be proved not to have been contemporaneous ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... furnished; and at Buffalo, which is a city half the size of Birmingham, the hotel is perhaps better furnished than any hotel in London. An immense menu is placed before the visitor for breakfast and dinner. There is an embarrassment of choice. Perhaps it is insular prejudice which makes one prefer the simple menu, the limited choice, and the plain food of the English hotels. At least, rightly or wrongly, the English hotels appear to the English traveller the more comfortable. I return to the differences. In the ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature. The stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama; a peculiar fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at the time when volcanic action began in this field. Here, even more clearly than in the case of Vesuvius, we see that the materials driven forth from the crater are derived not from just beneath its foundation, but from a distance, from realms which in the case of this insular volcano are beneath the sea floors. It is certain that here the migration of rock matter, impelled by the expansion of its contained water toward the vent, has so far exceeded that which has been discharged through the crater that an uprising ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the inquisitors. The valet was arrested, his despatches taken, and Ottolini fled from Bergamo. This gave a beginning to the general rising of the Venetian States. In fact, the force of circumstances alone brought on the insurrection of those territories against their old insular government. General La Hoz, who commanded the Lombard Legion, was the active protector of the revolution, which certainly had its origin more in the progress of the prevailing principles of liberty than in the crooked ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... noticed that no great poem, no great religion, no great creation of any kind, was ever written or conceived by people who lived in the valleys, cramped by the hills. The hills narrow one's horizon, make one insular, provincial, limited. And what is true of literature and art is true also of life. The man of low ideals never vaticinates; the man who is living down in the lower ranges of existence never prophesies. The man with a low brow has always a limited perspective; so, also, the man ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... of the South African situation which kept the Army Corps in England three months after it should have been sent to the Cape, is still to be met with. This attitude of mind—whether it be a consciousness of moral rectitude, or a mere insular disdain of looking at things from any but a British point of view—is still to be observed in the statements of those politicians who will even now deny that any trace of a definite plan of action, or of a concerted ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... encountered in their northward cruise. It is noteworthy that, even after the brief Channel operations, an epidemic caused heavy mortality in the English fleet. Finally, the Armada is a classic example of the value of naval defense to an insular nation. In the often quoted words of Raleigh, "To entertain the enemy with their own beef in their bellies, before they eat of our Kentish capons, I take it to be the wisest way, to do which his Majesty after God will employ his good ships ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... insular feeling that we express the same sentiment; but, nevertheless, we do feel it to be something to boast of, that our countrywomen will not have to learn the art of Wax Flower Modelling from foreigners, many of whom however have been amongst the ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... are told by competent authorities that one of our best means of preserving peace with foreign powers is to maintain a strong navy. This has become much more necessary since the United States has begun to acquire insular possessions. Although the construction of the modern American navy was not begun until 1883, there has been a notable advance within the past few years. In 1910 it was estimated that our navy is excelled in strength only by that of Great Britain. Congress, in 1910, continued ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James
... caurinus, the species to the southward in British Columbia, in larger size and longer tail." He remarked (loc. cit.): "I had supposed that the red-backed mouse occurring on the mainland coast of this region would prove to be E. wrangeli, but the latter appears to be purely an insular species. I have had no specimens of that race for comparison, but the Evotomys secured differ so widely from it in all the essential peculiarities of the species as given in the published descriptions that there seems little doubt of their belonging ...
— Comments on the Taxonomy and Geographic Distribution of North American Microtines • E. Raymond Hall
... OF WAR.—National defense is the chief concern of the Secretary of War. Coast fortifications, the supervision of navigation, and river and harbor improvements fall within the scope of the department. Our insular possessions are administered by the Secretary of War. It is also the duty of this officer to prepare estimates of the expenses of his department, to supervise all expenditures for the support and transportation of the army, and to take charge of the issuance ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... he was obnoxious, he returned to the Continent. Soon after "he was called to a destiny more suited to his proud and ambitious nature than to be the unequal partaker of sovereign power over a jealous insular people." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... good balance of nitrogen and oxygen, plus carbon dioxide, argon, et cetera, was mostly surface water, yet offered polar ice caps and a reasonable land area, as taken in the aggregate, although present in the form of scattered, insular masses. The largest of these, about half the size of Terra's Australia, was a comfortable number of degrees above the equator and had been selected as representative for detailed examination. Briefly: standard terrain—a balance between mountains, desert, and plain; flora, varied; fauna, ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... upbringing of a child brought a smile to his lips. She was about as unsuited, in her own way, as he. Caro Craven was a bachelor lady of fifty—spinster was a term wholly inapplicable to the strong-minded little woman who had been an art student in Paris in the days when insular hands were lifted in horror at the mere idea, and was a designation, moreover, deprecated strongly by herself as an insult to one who stood—at least in her own sphere—on an equality with the lords of ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... first) of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers, annotated copiously in MS. by a contemporary reader who was certainly not an admirer; and upon whom W.H.'s cockneyisms, Gallicisms, egotisms, and "ille-isms" generally, seem to have had the effect of a red rag upon an inveterately insular bull. "A very ingenious but pert, dogmatical, and Prejudiced Writer" is his uncomplimentary addition to the author's name. Then here is Cunningham's Goldsmith of 1854, vol. i., castigated with equal energy by that Alaric Alexander Watts,[2] of whose egregious strictures upon Wordsworth we read ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... bitterness against his own compatriots; and although this imaginative and liberal spirit met with disapproval from the ruling powers in England, and was finally the cause of his withdrawal, his conciliatory policy was amply justified by the event. Indeed, it is certain that the insular assurance—by no means absent from subsequent public life in England—which prompted Lord Gosford, the previous Governor, to declare that the ulterior object of the French Canadian politicians was "the separation of this country from England, and the establishment of a republican form of government," ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... monarchies of the Continent, who detested the doctrines which were then taking root in the land. Against the cabals of Rome, the navies of Spain, and the armies of France,—alike hostile and dangerous,—England could make but a feeble show of physical forces, and was protected only by her insular position. The public dangers were so imminent that there was needed not only a strong hand but a stout heart and a wise head at the helm. Excessive caution was necessary, perpetual vigilance was imperative; a single imprudent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... his lip as he seated himself. Mr. Percy Bobus, with true insular breeding, took up ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with Malta and some islets, an insular group lying between the eastern part of Sicily and the Lesser Syrtis. It is situated in Lat. 36 2', Long. 12 10' nearly, and is distant from Sicily only about fifty miles. The colonisation of the island by the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... People may come to do anything by talking of it. The Reverend Mr. Hector Maclean. Bayle. Leibnitz and Clarke. Survey of Col. Insular life. Arrive at Breacacha. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... of all, let it be remembered that the average Briton of to-day is not the average Briton of yesterday. Three years ago he was a prosperous, comfortable, thoroughly insular Philistine. He took a proprietary interest in the British Empire, and paid a munificent salary to the Army and Navy for looking after it. There his Imperial responsibilities ceased. As for other nations, he recognized ...
— Getting Together • Ian Hay
... then by Loudon to Auchinleck in Ayrshire, the seat of my family, and then by Hamilton, back to Edinburgh, where he again spent some time. He thus saw the four Universities of Scotland[782], its three principal cities, and as much of the Highland and insular life as was sufficient for his philosophical contemplation. I had the pleasure of accompanying him during the whole of this journey. He was respectfully entertained by the great, the learned, and the elegant, wherever he went; nor was he less delighted with the hospitality ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... has ruined all the real romance of war. There is no way of conveying the distinction, except by saying vaguely that there is a way of doing things, and that butchering is not necessary to a good army any more than gobbling is necessary to a good dinner. In our own insular shorthand it can be, insufficiently and narrowly but not unprofitably, expressed by saying that it is possible both to fight and to eat like a gentleman. It is therefore highly significant that Mr. Raemaekers has in this cartoon conceived the devil primarily as a kind of ogre. It is a matter of ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the courteous tone of the request. He had noted down the most important, extraordinary and, picturesque features of the robbery of the diligence, the state of Vendee, and the details about the Companions of Jehu, thanking each informant by voice and gesture with the stiffness peculiar to our insular cousins, replacing his note-book enriched each time by a new item in a ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... probably throw some light, discussing as they do, at great length, the lives of such English Saints as Edward the Confessor and Wilfrid of York; and yet they are not too favourably disposed towards our insular Saints, since they plainly express their opinion that our pious simplicity has filled their Acts with incredible legends and miracles, more suited to excite laughter ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... old continents to the new, embracing both, and thus hold in his grasp the equilibrium—the balance of power of the world. We may well imagine what that equilibrium will be when Napoleon the Third shall hold the balance in his hands. Already he has considerable possessions (insular and continental) in North and South America, and Mexico, under Maximilian, is substantially a French dependency. He holds Algiers. He is colonizing Egypt (as I myself saw this year) by his railroads and canals. He ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... message was flashed to the great naval radio station at Arlington, Va., which repeated it to the extent of its carrying radius of 3,000 miles, notifying all American ships at foreign stations and the governors and military posts of American insular possessions in the Pacific ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... which makes a trap for the stranger. One's first impression is that they are entirely soft. Then one comes suddenly upon something very hard, and you know that you have reached the limit and must adapt yourself to the fact. They have, for example, their insular conventions ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of which the writer speaks. English prejudice looks with special coldness on conscientious motives it does not understand, and with which it can have but little sympathy. Doyle was a man of purer motives and finer sympathies than George Cruikshank; but the same insular prejudice which conduced to the ruin of George Cruikshank, wrecked the future prospects of an artist almost as original in some respects as the more brilliant George. From the moment that Doyle retired from Punch, English fanaticism and English prejudice persisted in regarding ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... bulk of the traffic of the pigeons is with the mainland, that of the metallic starlings is purely local, though, perhaps, just as important. The insular communities do not venture for their merchandise across the water, and those of the mainland have no ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... great insular empire, almost all individuals, from the most exalted and powerful in the land to the lowly and obscure, are at some period of their lives induced, by their various avocations and pursuits, to leave their own coasts. The brave seamen, the gallant soldiers, and the various subjects ...
— An Appeal to the British Nation on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck (1825) • William Hillary
... the tour—the lone shieling and the misty island—were a source of pleasing recollection. Taken earlier, it would have removed many of his insular prejudices by wider survey and more varied conversation. 'The expedition to the Hebrides,' he wrote to Boswell some years after, 'was the most pleasant journey I ever made;' and two years later, after restless and tedious nights, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... was the history of Pontack's, a French ordinary in Abchurch Lane which played a conspicuous part in the social life of London during the eighteenth century. Britons of that period had their own insular contempt for French cookery, as is well illustrated by Rowlandson's caricature which, with its larder of dead cats and its coarse revelation of other secrets of French cuisine, may be regarded as typical ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... of her Cousins, I was feasted and made welcome, and everybody would have died for me." Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king in a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had declared themselves. "Paoli," said he, at the dinner table,[1115]" was a great man. He loved his country. My father was his adjutant, and never will I forgive him for having aided ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... for some such answer, but I shall be just to you in my thoughts, Viscount Medenham. I know you are a brave man. It is not cowardice, but your insular convention that restrains you from facing me on ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... pretensions.] of having bearded the elite of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorised rumour steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of the regular despatches. The government news was generally the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... of State, Fish and Wildlife Service (Department of the Interior), National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (Department of Defense), Naval Facilities Engineering Command (Department of Defense), Office of Insular Affairs (Department of the Interior), US Board on Geographic Names (Department of the Interior), and other public ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... against the measure, overruled a line of decisions in which the tax had been sustained and thereby effectually deprived Congress of the power to impose a Federal Income Tax until such time as the court may change its mind. Even more significant are the recent Insular cases in which the division of opinion and diversity of grounds for the conclusions reached are, to say the ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... the masthead. In a short time we came off Cape Frio, a high, barren, almost insular, promontory, which runs into the Atlantic to the eastward of Rio de Janeiro. We stood on, the land appearing to be of a great height behind the beach, till we came in sight of the Sugar-loaf Mountain; the light land wind preventing us from ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... talking with her friends. Presently they rose, and came across the room with her. Guy stood up and bowed. The introductions were informal, but he felt his insular prejudices a little shattered by the delightful ease with which these two Frenchmen accepted the situation. Their breeding was as obvious as their bonhomie. The table was speedily rearranged to find places ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... General that England had at her disposal an army which could be sent to the Continent, composed of six divisions of infantry and eight brigades of cavalry—together 160,000 troops. She has also everything which is necessary for her to defend her insular territory. Everything is ready. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... and which certainly deserves all the praise given to it by Cook. I would specially recommend a fine little harbour, some miles to the south of the place, where the captain cast anchor. Our navigation of the 'Passe des Francais' had definitively settled the insular character of the whole of the district terminating in the 'Cape Stephens' of Cook. It is divided from the mainland of Te-Wahi-Punamub[1] by the Current Basin. The comparison of our chart with that of the strait as laid down by Cook will ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... fellowship with the broad world, and had the benefit of this in a larger measure of social fructification. Whatever is separated dies. Quakerism uttered a word so profound that the utterance made it insular; and, left to itself, it began to be lost in itself. Nevertheless, Quakerism and Puritanism are the two richest historic soils ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... beautiful and individual national variants were produced. The continual interchange of manuscripts among the nations on the continent of Europe probably explains the more conventional character and strong general resemblance of most of the early Continental work; but the scribes of insular England, less influenced by contemporary progress and examples, produced forms of greater individuality (see 46, 47, 48). In Ireland, letter forms originally derived from early Roman models were developed through many decades with no ulterior influences, ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... on this occasion to admiration. The rencontre was a most affecting one, conducted in voluble French in the full blaze of publicity in a crowded hotel lounge. The English audience was impressed and honestly sympathetic; our insular reserve has been melted in the fires of war. "It is a French lady, poor thing, who has lost her husband," they whispered, the one to another, "and that handsome fellow in ordinary evening-dress is her man's brother officer, who was with him at ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... continent would materially increase that mutual interest—might even make sulky France more friendly towards us, and probably prove of benefit both commercially and socially; but only so long as the insular power of England is maintained. Although our army and navy are hardly as strong as they should be, we want no conscription here. What we do want is to preserve the peace and honour of our homes, our children in the colonies, and ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... agitated an event took place which compromised the peace of Europe; this was the return of Napoleon from his insular kingdom to repossess himself of his old French empire. A message from the prince regent was delivered to each house on the 6th of April, communicating this information, and stating that his royal highness had been induced to give directions for the immediate augmentation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... contend, to give real information is to shake off all insular prejudice and not call things by their wrong names, i.e. claim as "British," things which are not essentially so. To this end I have labelled ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... in the so-called "country of the Gauls" (-ager Gallicus-). But even there Etruscan settlements must have continued partially at least to subsist, somewhat as Ephesus and Miletus remained Greek under the supremacy of the Persians. Mantua at any rate, which was protected by its insular position, was a Tuscan city even in the time of the empire, and Atria on the Po also, where numerous discoveries of vases have been made, appears to have retained its Etruscan character; the description ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... governing the externals of women in various particulars. And the principal result was to make the English code seem insular and antique. She had an extremely large white hat, with a very feathery feather in it, and some large white roses between the brim and her black hair. Her black hair was positively sable, and one single immense lock of it was drawn ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... little as there might be of which England could boast with truth, she might at any rate boast of her peaches without fear of contradiction. Indeed, my idea had been that good peaches were to be got in England only. I am beginning to doubt whether my belief on the matter has not been the product of insular ignorance and idolatrous self-worship. It may be that a peach should be a combination of an apple and a turnip. "My great objection to your country, sir," said another, "is that you have got no vegetables." Had he told me that we had got no sea-board, or no coals, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... unknown to the delicate hand Of the fairest and first in this insular land, But in Patronage Royal delighting; And which now your own feminine fantasy wins, Tho' it scarce seems a lady-like work, that begins In a scratching and ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... were not the quest of the higher level and the extended horizon, international history would be imposed by the exclusive and insular reason that parliamentary reporting is younger than parliaments. The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government, and no arcanum imperii. For him the foundations have been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism is accounted for as ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... opinion that there reposed in the monastery of Fulda, Germany, an Archetypus which in the ninth century was copied twice: once in a Turonian hand—the manuscript now kept in the Vatican—the other copy written partly in insular, partly in Carolingian minuscle—the Cheltenham codex, now in New York. The common source at Fulda of these two manuscripts has been established by Traube. There is another testimony pointing to Fulda as the oldest known source. Pope Nicholas V commissioned Enoche of Ascoli to acquire old manuscripts ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the events of the day according to their partialities, and while the English charged the Austrian with having afforded the first ground of quarrel, those of other nations concurred in casting the greater blame upon the insular haughtiness ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... the Cuban War he was made Commissioner of Insular Affairs with headquarters in Washington. Here he remained but a short time when again he heard his country's call and was sent to the ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... simply followed the writings from this side of the Atlantic; others have been misled by their ignorance of the actual age of our game, for there are even many Americans who think base-ball was introduced by the Knickerbocker and following clubs; a few, with the proverbial insular idea, have concluded that base-ball must be of English origin, if for no other reason, because ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... no doubt laudable, but the methods she adopted to set the stranger at her ease were not those most likely to endear the insular English to their cousins across the Atlantic. Ida, to begin with, had not only a spice of temper but also no great reverence for forms and formulas, and the people that she was accustomed to meeting were those who had set their mark upon wide belts of forest and long leagues of ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... having knowledge of our nationality, mistook us for English people, and wrecked our nerves by making our tea as strong and black as beer, with a view to large "tea-money" for this delicate attention to our insular tastes. ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... reality an altered sandstone. Such is the appearance which it presents where weathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic trap. Be it what it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, wherever it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilian remains of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... upon one by smiling Ganymedes. If schools cannot alter character, they certainly can communicate to our cheerful English boys the most delightful manners in the world, so unembarrassed, courteous, easy, graceful, without the least touch of exaggeration or self-consciousness. I suppose one has insular prejudices, for we are certainly not looked upon as models of courtesy or consideration by our Continental neighbours. I suppose we reserve our best for ourselves. I expressed a wish to look at some of the new buildings, and a young ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... generously my friend.—Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how gratefully I have thanked you.—Fortune, Sir, has made you powerful, and me impotent; has given you patronage, and me dependence.—I would not for my single self, call on your humanity; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my eye—I could brave misfortune, I could face ruin; for at the worst, "Death's thousand doors stand open;" but, good God! the tender ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... her level glance of reproach with one of frank apology. "If I see a man whose face I like, I speak to him. Surely Nature does not flash that subtle sense of magnetism for nothing. If I am to live fully, then must I infuse into my insular existence the electric spark of sympathetic friendship. Why impoverish my existence by a lost opportunity? If I had not alighted that day upon the lake and waited for you to come through the trees—" he fell suddenly quiet, knocking the ashes from ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... distinguished a name, will therefore reflect no discredit upon a cautious student of nearly threescore years. The very Welsh talked, in William Baxter's time, of "Heaven, as bugarth PAPAN," the sun's ox-stall or resting-place; and here you likewise find his beetle-majesty, in a Low-Norman collection of insular rhymes:— ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... is an insular variety of the Mus hirsutus of W. Elliot, found in Southern India. They inhabit the forests, making their nests among the roots of the trees, and feeding, in the season, on the ripe seeds of the nilloo. Like the lemmings of Norway and Lapland, they migrate in vast numbers on the occurrence ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... one or two things become necessary. For example, I must have some acquaintance with your character, some certitude that you can keep your own counsel, and not divulge everything that arrives within your knowledge; also that you have some courage, some freedom of mind from small insular sentiments, some desire to promote the true interests of mankind, and the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... model. Not that any single comparison of the kind can convey the least idea of the complex idiosyncrasy of such a work. There is a substratum of Guide Book and Gil Blas, no doubt, but there are unmistakable streaks of Defoe, of Dumas, and of Dickens, with all his native prejudices and insular predilections strong upon him. A narrative so wide awake amidst a vagrant population of questionable morals and alien race suggests an affinity with Hajji Baba (a close kinsman, we conceive, of the Borrovian picaro). But, above all, as one follows the author through the mazes of his book, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... first who communicated to Europe any distinct ideas of the immense regions of Asia, from the Euxine eastwards, through the vast extent of Tartary to China and Japan; and the very first author who has made any mention of that distant insular sovereignty. Even Columbus is supposed, with some considerable probability, to have been prompted to his enterprize, which ended in the discovery of America, by the study of these travels; believing, that by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... discrepancy, he adopts the usual clumsy expedient of supposing two cities of the same name, one situated seven degrees south of the other. Salt corrects the error, but does not seem to have heard of old Zayla's insular position. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... ignorance, and though this attitude of lowering himself to deal gently with one whom he evidently looked upon as an irresponsible lunatic was most exasperating, I nevertheless claim great credit for having kept my temper with him. However, it turned out to be impossible for me to overcome his insular prejudice. He always supposed me to be a frivolous, volatile person, and so I was unable to prove myself of any value to ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... is very broad indeed, and in his "Northern Family," which is a branch of his "Insular Group," he includes such distinct linguistic stocks as "all the Indian tribes in the Russian territory," the Queen Charlotte Islanders, Koloshes, Ugalentzes, Atnas, Kolchans, Kenes, Tun Ghaase, Haidahs, and Chimmesyans. His Nootka-Columbian family is scarcely less incongruous, ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... involuntarily harking back to the insular belief that the veriest heathen will quake in unison with the British culprit at the mere threat of British law, showed the absolute yarborough she held in this game, the stakes of which she guessed were something more precious ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... countenances and hearts of gold." Paul, enchanted with the affability of the governor, said to him,—"I wish to be your friend: for you are a good man." Monsieur de la Bourdonnais received with pleasure this insular compliment, and, taking Paul by the hand, assured him he might ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... get into a groove staying at home so much. There's nothing like rubbing brains with foreigners. It stretches you out, clears you of all your narrow insular prejudices, brings you in touch"—Durant quivered; he knew it was coming—"in touch with fresh ideas. I don't know how you feel about it, but six months of it was enough to convince me that there's no place like England, and no people like English ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... re-established. A few Spaniards who had taken refuge there after the fall of Cadiz embarked on a vessel which the general allowed them to charter for their voyage to London. There was thus neither resistance nor reaction. This little insular restoration could not, however, be accomplished without a Mass, at which both companies of the troops were ordered to be present. Not knowing the rigor of the Carmelite rule, the general hoped to gain in the church some information about the nuns who were immured ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... is these peculiar customs that give an individuality to a nation, and John Bull abroad loses none of his insular obstinacy; but keeps his Christmas in the old fashion, and wears his clothes in the new fashion, without regard to heat or cold. A nation that never surrenders to the fire of an enemy cannot be expected to give in to the fire of the sun, but ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... independent and ferocious spirit to reanimate exhausted communities, and in their turn received a salutary mitigation, till in process of time the conqueror and conquered, having a common interest, were lost in each other. To neither of these modes was unfortunate Ireland subject, and her insular territory, by physical obstacles, and still more by moral influences arising out of them, has aggravated the evil consequent upon independence lost as hers was. The writers of the time of Queen Elizabeth have pointed out how unwise it was to transplant among a barbarous people, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... England's future was her insular position; this has been the case from the time Europe entered the ocean-period. Since the year 1600 England, by her commerce and politics, has influenced Europe from without, while she has maintained for herself a position of independence, ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Burma, and Annam became dependencies of China, and continued to send tribute as such even up to quite modern times. Hardly so successful was Kublai Khan's huge naval expedition against Japan, which, in point of number of ships and men, the insular character of the enemy's country, the chastisement intended, and the total loss of the fleet in a storm, aided by the stubborn resistance offered by the Japanese themselves—suggests a very obvious comparison with the object and fate ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... naval rival worthy of notice, and the insular position of England came to be a matter of serious concern by 1906. Britain has never considered the building of land forts for her protection—her strength has always been concentrated in floating war machines. She now began ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the train reached Dover we were "as thick as thieves," for Nakamura's perfect frankness and his geniality of manner quickly conquered my insular aloofness toward the foreigner; and upon boarding the Channel steamer we at once went below and were busy with our luncheon almost before the boat had cast ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... that I am severely taciturn at a table d'hote. I refrain from joining in the "delightful conversation" which flies across the table, and know that my reticence is attributed to "insular pride." It is really and truly nothing but impatience of commonplace. I thoroughly enjoy good talk; but, ask yourself, what are the probabilities of hearing that rare thing in the casual assemblage of forty or fifty people, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... wanted." But de Mersch didn't see the matter in that light at all. He could not, of course. He was as much used to being purred to as my aunt to looking down on non-county persons. He seemed to think I was making an incomprehensible insular joke, and laughed non-committally. It wouldn't have been possible to let him know ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... of the US with policy relations between the Virgin Islands and the US under the jurisdiction of the Office of Insular Affairs, US Department ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... dislike to Walpole was founded not so such upon posthumous jealousy—though that passion is not so rare as absurd—as on the singular contrast between the character and intellect of the two men. The typical Englishman, with his rough, strong sense, passing at times into the narrowest insular prejudice, detested the Frenchified fine gentleman who minced his mother tongue and piqued himself on cosmopolitan indifference to patriotic sentiment: the ambitious historian was irritated by the contempt which the dilettante dabbler in literature affected for their common art; and the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... knives. The servants of great houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles perilous to order. He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt civilization. Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... large on the various incomers to Fernando Po we may next turn to the natives, properly so-called, the Bubis. These people, although presenting a series of interesting problems to the ethnologist, both from their insular position, and their differentiation from any of the mainland peoples, are still but little known. To a great extent this has arisen from their exclusiveness, and their total lack of enthusiasm in trade matters, a thing that differentiates them more than any other characteristic ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... ruled in England down to the day of Hastings—call it the Saxon race, if you like the name, and for convenience' sake—was a slow, a sluggish, and a stupid race; and it never could have made a first-class nation of the insular kingdom. There is little in the history of the Saxons that allows us to believe they were capable of accomplishing anything that was great. The Danish invasions, as they are called, were of real use to England, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... ladies described the delights of the journey, which was taken in a leisurely sight-seeing manner; and as to Rocca Marina, it seemed to be an absolute paradise. Mr. White had taken care to send out an English upholsterer, so that insular ideas of comfort might be fulfilled within. Without, the combination of mountain and sea, the vine-clad terraces, the chestnut slopes, the magical colours of the barer rocks, the coast-line trending far away, the azure Mediterranean, with the white-sailed ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... involved. Thus far the champions have been chiefly the newspapers for spelling as it is, and scholars and educators for spelling as it ought to be. But, in spite of the intelligence of the disputants, the discussion has been singularly insular and deficient in perspective. It would gain greatly in conclusiveness if spelling and its modifications were considered broadly and historically, not as peculiar to English, but as common to all languages, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... departed, their places were presently taken by a distinguished Hungarian diplomat, Count —— and his wife. When I say of the count, who spoke English perfectly, that one could not distinguish him from a highly placed English gentleman, I am paying him, no doubt, an insular, but I mean it to be a ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... his precise position in insular zoology had been called in question, found himself hopelessly out of place. At that time Godefroid had blossomed out at the French Embassy in London, where he learned the adventures of Toby, Joby, Paddy. Godefroid found the infant weeping over a pot of jam (he had already lost the guineas ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... Lawford's cheek. It hurt him to hear his father speak so in referring to Louise Grayling. He, too, possessed some of the insular prejudice of his kind against those who win their livelihood in the glare of the theatrical spotlight. This gentle, well-bred, delightful girl staying at Cap'n Abe's store was a revelation to him. He held his tongue, however, and held his temper in ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... the natural forces which the Celts worshipped. Its historical background, social organization, chivalry, mood and thought and its heroic ideal are to a large extent, and with perhaps some pre-Aryan survivals, not only those of the insular Celts of two thousand years ago, but also of the important and wide-spread Celtic race with whom Caesar fought and who in an earlier period had sacked Rome and made themselves feared even ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... a twig that lay in his path, and recalled the wonderful regiments that he had seen march past the Kaiser only three months ago. Who was going to stop that mighty empire? Effeminate France? Insular, ease-loving England? ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... system was a world of its own; it was an insular world which could hardly have been more peculiar if it had belonged to another quarter of the globe altogether. All this, however, will change as soon as the tunnel is pierced ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Emerson was fascinated by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people, tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a self-governing citizen of a commonwealth ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... you are! You Americans are the most insular of all the great peoples of the world. You know nothing of other people. You know only your own history and not even that correctly, your own geography, and your own political science. You know nothing of Canada. You don't know, for instance, that the purest form of democracy on ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... of the trouveres counted within less than a century translations into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish, Dutch, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish"; and he might have added that England needed no translation, but helped to compose the poetry, not being at that time so insular as she afterwards became. "Such or such a work, composed in Morocco or in Cairo, was known at Paris and at Cologne in less time than it would need in our days for a German book of capital importance to pass the Rhine"; and Renan wrote this in 1852 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... rare intervals, Britain's insular position has given her people so soothing a sense of security that they have allowed the conception of the commonwealth to droop, and have tended to regard the State as, under normal conditions, a nuisance which should as far as possible be abated, ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... Suffice it here to say, that after much correspondence on the subject, Mr. Brock and Mr. Charles De Jersey, the king's procureur, were deputed to London, to act in conjunction with the bailiff and procureur of Jersey in opposing the measure. The mission was successful, and the independence of the insular jurisdictions ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... average parts and breeding, on board a Rhine steam-boat, and it is almost certain that the Yankee will mix up, so to speak, the better of the two. The gregarious habits of our continental neighbours are more familiar to him than to his insular kinsman, and he is not tormented like the latter by the perpetual fear of failing, either in what is due to himself or to others. His manners will probably want polish and dignity; he will be easy rather than graceful, communicative rather than affable; but he will at least preserve his Republican ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... always been an open wound. But he never spoke there, and listened to the fierce speeches of the local members with his idle, easy smile. He seemed to stand aloof from his new neighbours and their insular interests. He was, it appeared, a cultured man, and perhaps found none in this wild island who could understand his thoughts. His attitude towards his surroundings was, in a word, the usual indifferent attitude ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... flatly declined to budge an inch, the loyalists departed in a hurry, metaphorically wringing their hands at such an exhibition of ill-placed confidence and insular pride. This little scene occurred at dinner-time, and after dinner old Silas proceeded to hurl defiance at his foes in another fashion. Going to a cupboard in his bedroom, he extracted an exceedingly large Union Jack, and promptly advanced with it to an open spot between two of the orange-trees ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... fact being that through life I have always been one of his most devoted admirers. I did my best to conform to all the British institutions, as well as I could, though in the beginning I must no doubt have made fearful blunders, and possibly given offence to the truly insular Briton. Bunsen seemed to delight in asking me whenever he had Princes or other grandees to ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... outlines of primitive history in the Aegean may be sketched thus. A people, agreeing in its prevailing skull-forms with the Mediterranean race of N. Africa, was settled in the Aegean area from a remote Neolithic antiquity, but, except in Crete, where insular security was combined with great natural fertility, remained in a savage and unproductive condition until far into the 4th millennium B.C. In Crete, however, it had long been developing a certain civilization, and at a period more or less contemporary with Dynasties XI. and XII. (2500 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... regard to the past. My health was most lovingly discussed, and then my immediate and remoter future. I was aware of this point of view—that I was, of course, her own dear son, but that I was also England's son. She was intensely patriotic in the insular sense; my soul, I mean, belonged to the British Empire rather than to humanity and the world at large. Doubtless, a very right and natural way to look at things.... She expressed a real desire to "see your photographs, my boy, of those outlandish places where they sent you"; then, having ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... passions, as BOCCACCIO narrates his facetious stories, quite distinct from the inventions and style of northern writers. SHAKSPEARE is placed at a wider interval from all of them than they are from each other, and is as perfectly insular in his genius as his own countrymen were in their customs, and their modes of thinking ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... countless generations ([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277] England had long been growing more truly insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... a stranger to cities, no rustic gazing open-mouthed at throngs and tall buildings. His native city of Toronto was a fair-sized place as American and Canadian cities go. But it was not a seaport. It was insular rather than cosmopolitan; it took its character from its locale rather than from a population gathered from the four quarters of the globe. San Francisco—is San Francisco—a melting-pot of peoples, blown through with airs from far countries, not wholly rid of the ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Inguinal Guardian Tutelar Glass Vitreous Grape Uveous Grief Dolorous Gain Lucrative Help Auxiliary Heart Cordial, cardiac Hire Stipendiary Hurt Noxious Hatred Odious Health Salutary, salubrious Head Capital, chief Ice Glacial Island Insular King Regal, royal Kitchen Culinary Life Vital, vivid, vivarious Lungs Pulmonary Lip Labial Leg Crural, isosceles Light Lucid, luminous Love Amorous Lust Libidinous Law Legal, loyal Mother Maternal Money Pecuniary Mixture Promiscuous, miscellaneous Moon Lunar, sublunary Mouth Oral ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... emancipation. And truly if emancipation has really done so much mischief in Jamaica as they claim, it is a most damaging fact. Testimony of opposite results in the smaller islands would hardly countervail it. Such testimony would be good to prove that the freedom of the negro works well in densely peopled insular communities, where the pressure of population compels industry. The opponents of emancipation are willing sometimes to acknowledge that where the laboring population are, as they say, in virtual slavery to the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Often during my sojourn in America, I had pored over maps and vainly endeavoured to form some conception of so gigantic a territory. I had failed. I had come to the conclusion that minds nurtured in the insular atmosphere were forever incapable of visualizing a continent. In my fugitive letters to friends at home I had been reduced to the astronomer's facile illustrations. "Just as," I had written in despair—"just as a railway train, travelling at a mile a minute, takes nearly 180 years to reach ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... said. And on different occasions he had added reasons which, combined, formulated themselves into the following arguments. "We don't really know much of the Americans though they have been buying and selling and marrying us for some time. Our insular trick of feeling superior has held us mentally aloof from half the globe. But presumably the United States was from the first, in itself, an ideal, pure and simple. It was. It is asinine to pooh-pooh it. ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rates towards the support of a Church of England school, finds himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church of Rome in Malta, but to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy of offering Bibles for sale in the streets of Khartoum. Turn to France, a country ten times more insular in its pre-occupation with its own language, its own history, its own character, than we, who have always been explorers and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred nation is forty millions strong. The total population of the French Republic is about one hundred and fourteen millions. ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... bowl, I shtoffs him vith dat sheepstabak vat's dwisted in a roll, I gif my vort it ton't daste pad—zough yust a leedle veak— Shtill, ven I schmokes inzide a drain,—I vinds zom laties seeck! (Amiable surprise, as you mention this instance of insular intolerance.) Bot, zere, you makes me chadderbox, and dakes op all my dime! I vant to dell you how mein vriend behafed himself sooblime: "If you vill pe mein Braut," he zaid, "tobaggo I'll renounce, And shvear to nefer puy no more von solidary ounce!" Zo she gif him out her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... or as the drop-scene to some drama which might suddenly be raised and disappear from my sight. The house, in short, together with its furniture, was, I believe, intended to be a reproduction of an ancient Roman villa, and had something about it repellent to my rustic and insular ideas. In the contemplation of its perfection I experienced a curious mental sensation, which I can only compare to the physical oppression produced on some persons by the heavy and cloying perfume of a bouquet of gardenias or other too ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... and the like, there came, of course, increased knowledge, a wider outlook. No discipline came with it, and one of its earliest products was a nervous dread of being thought behind the time, of being called ignorant, narrow-minded, insular. People would do anything to avoid this. They went to the length of interlarding their speech and writings with foreign words often in ignorance of the meaning of those words. Broad-minded, catholic, tolerant, cosmopolitan—those were the descriptive ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... by as hackneyed. Out of these six satires, you may perhaps select some twenty lines, which fit so well as many thoughts, that they will recur to the scholar almost as readily as a natural image; though when translated into familiar language, they lose that insular emphasis, which fitted them for quotation. Such lines as the following, translation cannot render commonplace. Contrasting the man of true religion with those who, with jealous privacy, would fain carry on a secret commerce with ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... uncommon thing to hear an American speak of British insularity—the Englishman's "insular prejudices" or his "insular conceit." On one occasion I took the opportunity of interrupting a man who, I was sure, did not know what "insular" might mean, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... hemisphere. This is also indicated by the whole character of the Upper Miocene flora of Central Europe, which does not necessitate a mean temperature very much greater than exists at present, if we suppose such absence of winter cold as is proper to insular climates. Professor Heer believes that the mean temperature of North Greenland must have been at least 30 degrees higher than at present, while an addition of 10 degrees to the mean temperature of Central Europe would probably ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell |
