They kept out the French Revolution, and Napoleon.

They kept out for a long time the Kantian philosophy, Romanticism, Pessimism, Higher Criticism, German music, French painting, and one knows not how many other of the intellectual experiments that made life worth living, or not worth living, to nineteenth-century Europe.

Their insularity, spiritual as well as geographical, has whetted the edge of a thousand flouts and gibes.
"Those stupid French!" exclaims the sailor, as reported by De Morgan: "Why do they go on calling a cabbage a _shoe_ when they must know that it is a _cabbage ?_" This was in general the attitude of what Mr Newbolt has styled the "Island Race" when on its travels.

Everybody has laughed at the comedy of it, but no one has sufficiently applauded its success.
The English tourist declined to be at the trouble of speaking any foreign tongue whatsoever; instantly every hotel and restaurant on the Continent was forced to learn English.

He refused to read their books; a Leipsic firm at once started to publish his own, and sold him his six-shilling Clapham novels in Lucerne for two francs.