"Insular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looking. The persecuted young woman had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cozy warmth of the station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand, caught ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... antiquity, found the genius of a happier race, able to point out at a glance the defect in it; men who saw with a glance at those old books what was the matter with them; men prepared already to overlook from the new height of criticism which this sturdy insular development of the practical genius of the North created, the remains of that lost civilization—the splendours rescued from the wreck of empires,—the wisdom which had failed so fatally in practice that it must needs cross from a lost world ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the West for three-hundred years now gagged and bound, since the flight to Rome of her last native Princes, she stands to-day as in the days of Philip III, if an outcast from European civilization non the less rejecting the insular tradition of England, as she has rejected her insular Church. And now once more in her career she turns to the greatest of European Sovereigns, to win his eyes to the oldest, and certainly the most faithful of European ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... Territorial Expansion Race Problems Tariff and Free Trade Transportation Money Systems Our Insular Possessions Growth of Population Trusts Banks and Banking Immigration Capital and Labor Education Inventions Suffrage Centralization of Government Strikes and Lockouts Panics and Business Depressions Commerce Taxation ...
— What the Schools Teach and Might Teach • John Franklin Bobbitt
... such as the common star-fish and sea-urchin, many of the medusae and corals, and the simpler sponges (Olynthus). We may take as an illustration the palingenetic segmentation and germinal layer-formation in an eight-fold insular coral, which I discovered in the Red Sea, and ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... when walled and very considerable such as Vienna and Genava, were in the view of the Greeks and Romans nothing but villages. In the time of Caesar the original clan-constitution still subsisted substantially unaltered among the insular Celts and in the northern cantons of the mainland; the general assembly held the supreme authority; the prince was in essential questions bound by its decrees; the common council was numerous—it numbered in certain clans six hundred ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Transportation), National Imagery and Mapping Agency (Department of Defense), Antarctic Information Program (National Science Foundation), Naval Facilities Engineering Command (Department of Defense), Office of Insular Affairs (Department of the Interior), Office of Naval Intelligence (Department of Defense), US Board on Geographic Names (Department of the Interior), and other public ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... not be gauged by any of the ordinary restrictions applicable to normal humanity, was never subsequently erased from his recollections. It must be emphasised, moreover, that John Stanhope was by temperament and training singularly cosmopolitan in his outlook, and free from insular prejudice even with regard to his country's foe, so much so that, when he again had an opportunity of observing Napoleon, he readily acknowledged the strange magnetism of the man whose personality yet filled him ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... 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 ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... after a short sojourn in that country, whose crown he vainly tried to obtain, and to whose people 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
... prepared 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 the field. Nevertheless, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... comes to fish, it is allowed that we are not an insular people for nothing. There are other forms of good living that Paris knows not of, so to speak, at first hand, native to England. Turtle soup, turbot and lobster sauce, a haunch of venison, and a grouse, are, we may say without chauvinism, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... live, are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people; and the common people will use them freely as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and I believe that this is not deplorable, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... symmetrical. His 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 ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge. So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account. "I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that you will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener. By Mr. Inglewood's favour we ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... he was with the fact that the south-coast of Java had already been circumnavigated by European navigators, VAN LINSCHOTEN did not venture decidedly to assert the insular nature of this island. It might be connected with the mysterious South-land, the Terra Australis, the Terra Incognita, whose fantastically shaped coast-line was reported to extend south of America, Africa and Asia, in ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... themselves out in masquerade costumes, with bagpipe and goatskin, with crossed leggings and scarlet petticoats, who let themselves out to artists at so many pauls per sitting; but he never passed a Roman's door except to buy a cigar or to purchase a handkerchief. Thither, as elsewhere, we carry our insular habits with us. We have a little England at Paris, a little England at Munich, Dresden, everywhere. Our friend is an Englishman, and did at ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... connection with the 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 creation. She was a sculptor, whose work was ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... necessarily be rivalry between the two men. Hence he had to prepare for the worst, and still, as far as he could, to try to pacify these rivals; but to reconcile an American and an Englishman, two men hostile to one another from their birth, one endowed with real insular prejudice, the other with the adventurous, irreverent spirit of his country, was no easy task. When the doctor thought of their eager rivalry, which in fact was one of nationalities, he could not ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... States. In the West Indies, in Mexico and South America the great body of the slaves were far below the slaves of this country in their intellectual and moral condition—and, in the former, their power to act in concert was weakened by the insular fragments ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... from 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 entering the harbour, we had to stand off and on ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... 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
... rather than pay 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
... landing-places on the shore, and served to protect the reservoirs; it lay under the shadow of a rock, on which was built, facing the insular temple of Melkarth, protector of mariners, a sanctuary of almost equal antiquity dedicated to his namesake of the mainland.* The latter divinity was probably the representative of the legendary Samemrum, who had built his village ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Dumbarton to Glasgow, 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... coast in a manner reminiscent of 1940. I don't know exactly what value the giving of the alarm would have been; nevertheless, night and day eyes were strained through binoculars and telescopes for signs of the unique green on the horizon or the first seed slipping through to find a home on insular soil. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... with comfort as the most thorough-going Englishman need desire, had yet about them a touch of lightness and elegance that smacked of a taste that had been educated on the Continent, and was unfettered by insular prejudices. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... Tyrian Baal, who is also called Melkart (king of the city), and is often identified with the Greek Heracles, but sometimes with the Olympian Zeus, we have many accounts in ancient writers, from Herodotus downwards. He had a magnificent temple in insular Tyre, founded by Hiram, to which gifts streamed from all countries, especially at the great feasts. The solar character of this deity appears especially in the annual feast of his awakening shortly after the winter solstice (Joseph. C. Apion. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... a cane. His dark face, bronzed by recent exposure to the Egyptian sun, was handsome in a saturnine fashion, and a touch of gray at the temples tended to enhance his good looks. He carried himself in that kind of nonchalant manner which is not only insular ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the dowry of a young girl was estimated by the number 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 in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... way, I 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 the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... can look back forty years must well remember the fancy that society took, on a sudden, to interrogate children. It is an odd thing to recall now one of the strangest fashions of a period full of wild fashions. After a long term of insular seclusion, through the war, we welcomed all sorts of foreigners to our soil, and all manner of foreign notions to our minds. The grand discovery of the benefit of questioning children made great way in the country, and among some of the best-hearted people ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... look—meinzelf I shmoke a bipe, mit baintings on ze 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, August 13, 1887 • Various
... other too ardent. I see it all before me with the two new champions freshly girded for the strife, but a peaceful strife, my friend. Let our experience be at least profitable to you, and let it be a peaceful contention of emulation such as is alone suited to that insular nation which finds its strongest stimulus in domestic comfort and wealth. Apropos, has some one pursued a small discovery of mine, that, had I not been a stranger of a proscribed nation, and had not your ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... met with less cordial response among her rulers. For during the decade following the Peace of Paris the vision of liberty was half obscured by the vision of empire. Observant contemporaries noted the sudden rise of an insular egoism following the war that in Voltaire's phrase saw "England victorious in four parts of the world." Cowper was not alone in complaining "that thieves at home must hang, but he that puts into his over-gorged and bloated ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... selfish element of the practical supersede the generous element. Your father never did so in his speeches, and therefore we admired him. At the present day we don't so much care to study English speeches; they may be insular,—they are not European. I honour England; Heaven grant that you may not be making sad mistakes in the belief that you can long remain England if you cease to be European." Herewith the German bowed, not ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... get your note and the Notts. Newspaper. I have seldom been more pleased in my life than at hearing how successfully your lecture (At the Nottingham meeting of the British Association, August 27, 1866. The subject of the lecture was 'Insular Floras.' See "Gardeners' Chronicle", 1866.) went off. Mrs. H. Wedgwood sent us an account, saying that you read capitally, and were listened to with profound attention and great applause. She says, when your ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Montmartre. Any time I get a bad 5 franc piece, I pass it on to her, and she gets rid of it in the change to some Froggie. My God, they are dishonest! I wouldn't say a word against the French, but just that one thing. They're dishonest—damned dishonest." He sat back on the bench, a figure of insular rectitude but of cosmopolitan broadmindedness. Is ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... herself, as I am grown to be for you. That panic, which will last for many months, adds to my fervent desire of your returning early in the autumn, that you may have neither fresh water nor the "silky" ocean to cross in winter. Precious as our insular situation is, I am ready to wish with the Frenchman, that you could somehow or other get to it by land,— Oui, c'est une isle toujours, je le sais bien; mais, par exemple, en allant d'alentour, n'y auroit-il pas ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... all his men to swear that Cuba was, to the best of their belief, part of the Asian continent. Yet, within six years, La Cosa depicts it on his map as an island—and that was before Ocampo had proved it one, by sailing around it, in 1508. It is thought that La Cosa obtained his information as to the insular character of Cuba from Vespucci, when they voyaged together on the coast of Terra Firma, which we now know as the northern ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... origin of earth for granted. The Hurons account for its origin; a speck of earth was fished out of the waters and grew. In M. H. de Charencey's tract Une Legende Cosmogonique (Havre, 1884) this legend is traced. M. de Charencey distinguishes (1) a continental version; (2) an insular version; (3) a mixed and Hindoo version. Among continental variants he gives a Vogul version (Revue de Philologie et d'Ethnographie, Paris, 1874, i. 10). Numi Tarom (a god who cooks fish in heaven) hangs ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... menace to the future of the Porto Rican people is the danger of an outbreak of violence and intolerance on the part of one section of your people against another; the danger of insular turning against peninsular; of Porto Rican turning against Spaniard, with the torch and dagger, to avenge himself for the wrongs and oppressions, real or imaginary, which have so long characterized the Spanish domination in ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... 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 ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... explanation of the title that Jena stands for French supremacy and German defeat—Sedan for German victory and a French debacle; but he should be warned that in this truthful mirror of life there may be details liable to shock insular notions. The author could not shrink from such in the fulfilment of his task, which was to give the truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth. His work must be judged not only as a novel (and assuredly as such it is a most admirable and artistic ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... subjection to his arms. At the time of the arrival of the Tonquin he had about forty schooners, of from twenty to thirty tons burden, and one old American ship. With these he held undisputed sway over his insular domains, and carried on intercourse with the chiefs or governors whom he had placed in command of the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... the Rathis and Atirathas. Then comes the arrival of the messenger 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 death of Abhimanyu; and then the vow ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... louder—and died away. It was only when it had completely ceased that one realized how pronounced it had been—how altogether peculiar, secret; like that incomprehensible murmuring in a bazaar when, unknown to the insular visitor, a ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... 'Mudians in her were characteristic samples of the inhabitants. Their faces and skins, where exposed, were not tanned, but absolutely burnt into a fiery-red colour by the sun. They guessed and drawled like any buckskin from Virginia, superadding to their accomplishments their insular peculiarity of always shutting one eye when they spoke to you. They are all Yankees at bottom; and if they could get their 365 Islands—so they call the large stones on which they live—under weigh, they would not be long in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... match, arguing, shouting, or shampooing the legs of ponies, whose turn was yet to come; and through all the confused hubbub of laughter, cheering, and mercifully incoherent profanity, a British infantry band hammering out with insular assurance, "We'll fight and we'll ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... negatives, as an author who is always right has defined the lady to be in England. Even in France she is not that, and between the Frenchwoman and the Italian there are the Alps. In a word, the educated Italian mondaine is, in the sense (also untranslatable) of singular, insular, and absolutely British usage, a Native. None the less would she be surprised to find herself accused ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... exchanged their clothing for the half-exposed fashion of the native chiefs; and, adopting their pursuits and pleasures, became hunters, and bold fishers in the light canoe. Finally, they learnt to speak the language, as if they had been born in the island; and, at length, sealed their insular destiny by marrying native women. Laonce was hardly eighteen when he was first cast ashore amongst them; but having a handsome person, and those engaging manners, from a naturally amiable disposition added to a gentleman's breeding, which never fail agreeably impressing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... 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 him ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... of Melna-Terra, had an atmosphere with a 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, ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... 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, ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... With insular directness he went straight to the point at the first interview, declared his love for Agatha, and proposed an exchange, which amused, but did not offend me, as I knew that such bargains were common ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 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 ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... Faithful to his insular prejudices, Norgate, on finding that the other seat in his coupe was engaged, started out to find the train attendant with a view to changing his place. His errand, however, was in vain. The train, ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... all been brought about by our unaccountably careless and culpable want of accurate knowledge at home, of the actual situation. We lost a splendid chance of consolidating South Africa in a homogeneous union under the British crown. Our insular in difference, our ignorance, the fierce animosity of our party political prejudices, made us neglect the opportunity. It has had the effect of creating the sorest feelings against us, on the part of the large English population, ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... 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 board, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... not above ten miles distant from Fusina. As I started from Venice at six in the morning I had a fine receding view of the Ocean Queen, with her steeples and turrets rising from the sea. Venice has no fortifications and needs them not. Her insular position protects her from land attacks, and the shoals prevent the approach of ships of war. Floating batteries therefore and gunboats are her best defence. The road from Fusina to Padua is on the banks of the Brenta the whole way, and is lined with ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... that part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of half an hour before we reached the village. As he accompanied us in person, we had the satisfaction of frequently telling him our mind with insular frankness. He pretended to be much distressed, but assured us each time we returned to the charge—about every quarter of an hour—that we were close to the desired spot. From the village to the source, the way led us ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... stately English. Probably the "English dancing-schools" in those days would think the solemn walk of the Pavan quite as lively an amusement as good society could allow. There are other passages too which show that Shakespeare (or his characters) had a fine 'insular' feeling against these 'newfangled' fashions ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... been first published in England, for Irving was an English writer. The idea has been more than once echoed here. The truth is, that while Irving was intensely American in feeling, he was, first of all, a man of letters, and in that capacity he was cosmopolitan; he certainly was not insular. He had a rare accommodation of tone to his theme. Of England, whose traditions kindled his susceptible fancy, he wrote as Englishmen would like to write about it. In Spain he was saturated with the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hitherto found impracticable to bring the parties to an understanding satisfactory to both. The relative geographical position and the respective products of nature cultivated by human industry had constituted the elements of a commercial intercourse between the United States and British America, insular and continental, important to the inhabitants of both countries; but it had been interdicted by Great Britain upon a principle heretofore practiced upon by the colonizing nations of Europe, of holding the trade of their colonies each in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... her eyes rapidly, 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
... and Canning to Grenville and Howick brought no immediate change in our insular policy and the new government had been in office for above three months before a British force at last appeared in the Swedish island of Ruegen. It arrived too late, Danzig surrendered in May, and on June 14 Napoleon obtained a ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... Teutonic influence would have overpowered the Celtic. But the sea forms a sufficient barrier to cut off every new band of immigrants from the country of their origin. This isolation drives them into insular communion with the country of their invasion. Thus, however often invaded and ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... so terribly insular. You must really get rid of all that. I used to think like you, but here we have got to the place where we can laugh at all that ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... resort to the inciting of feud and jealousy between the clans, villages, and provinces in the island, to keep them from uniting against him. He found it convenient to employ me as a tub to the whale, and, having first excited the insular jealousy against archaeological intrusion by foreigners, and inducing his clique of subordinate intriguers to oppose my operations, though the Christian population in general were in favor of permitting me to excavate wherever ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... this report never reached 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
... that Sir Richard Calmady would have the insolence, is so much the victim of insular prejudice as, to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... where any appeal was made to genteel English hearts. Preserve us from enjoying any thing but jokes and scandal! Preserve us from respecting any thing but rank and money! There were the social aspirations of these insular ladies and gentlemen, as expressed under other circumstances, and as betrayed amidst other scenes. Here, all was changed. Here was the strong feeling, the breathless interest, the hearty enthusiasm, not visible elsewhere. Here were the superb gentlemen ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... causeways, which are covered in the same manner as the water. This bridge is within a few feet of a mile in length, by means of which, the bridge at Charleston, and the neck of the peninsula, our communication with the continent is so complete, that we feel but few inconveniences from our insular situation. —We have a plentiful supply of provision. Our fish-market is an excellent one: the following species are larger than I remember seeing them in Europe; viz. hallibut, cod, mackarel, smelts, and lobsters. The first is often ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... command of the sea is intensified into a terror that sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the entire globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... meant co-operation. There could be no successful trading for British traders unless they found Indian traders ready to co-operate with them in trade. That we ever went to India at all was due to the national instincts of an insular people accustomed to go down to the sea in ships and to trade with distant lands. When the rise of great Mahomedan states on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, blocked the overland ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... should have passed it 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 the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... black hair, a little cocked nose, and was by no means so fortunate in his personal appearance as Mr. Warrington," said the Baron, with much presence of mind. "Warrington, Dorrington, Harrington? We of the continent cannot retain your insular names. I certify that this gentleman is not the individual of whom I spoke at dinner." And, glancing kindly upon him, the old beau sidled away to a farther end of the room, where Mr. Wolfe and Miss Lowther ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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
... one hand, in the going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the Enlightenment and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but complex. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... it does say. The English have the reputation of being the most reticent people in the world, and as there is no smoke without fire I suppose they have done something to deserve it; yet who can say that one doesn't constantly meet the most startling examples of the insular faculty to "gush"? In this instance the mother of the deceased takes the public into her confidence with surprising frankness and omits no detail, seizing the opportunity to mention by the way that she had already lost her husband by a most mysterious ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Britain are, its insular situation and the disposition of the people, and the excellent form ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... characters of it are old friends to that limited public which reads my books in England; their earlier adventures have been told in those previous volumes (and purposely omitted from "Happy Days" as being a little too insular). I feel somehow that strangers will not be on such easy terms with them, and I would recommend that you approach them last. By that time you will have discovered whether you are in a mood to stop and listen to their chatter, or prefer ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... conquerors of Mallius.[837] We have seen that the white oxen sacrificed at the mistletoe ritual may once have been representatives of the vegetation-spirit, which also animated the oak and the mistletoe. Among the insular Celts animal sacrifices are scarcely mentioned in the texts, probably through suppression by later scribes, but the lives of Irish saints contain a few notices of the custom, e.g. that of S. Patrick, which describes the gathering of princes, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... our hearts were less vagrant than our fancies. This was in the old time, and when English girls were content to be what God and nature had made them. Of late years we have changed the pattern, and have given to the world a race of women as utterly unlike the old insular ideal as if we had created another nation altogether. The girl of the period, and the fair young English girl of the past, have nothing in common save ancestry and their mother-tongue: and even of this last the modern version makes almost ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Insular conceit could surely scarcely go further. However, the Edinburgh Reviewer is forgotten and his name unknown; Pinel's name covered with glory, although not a popular hero; for when I made a pilgrimage to his grave in the great Paris cemetery, Pere la Chaise, in 1878, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... artistic impressions, musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of the US with policy relations between Guam and the US under the jurisdiction of the Office of Insular Affairs, US ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the case a century ago. Notwithstanding an occasional outbreak of Anglomania, the best French authors spell English proper names no better, the best French critics appreciate Shakspeare as little, and the majority of Parisians have no less partial and fixed a notion of the characteristics of their insular neighbors, than before the days of journalism and steam. The attempts to represent English manners and character are as gross caricatures now as in the time of Montaigne. However apt at fusion within, the national egotism is as repugnant to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the year, during the annual flood of the Nile, they lived on small islands within a country which itself was cut off from the rest of the world by the sea and the desert. No wonder that these people were what we call "insular," and had the habits of villagers who rarely come ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... towards inspiring the whole country with the desire for unity. Herein lies his great work. Without Mazzini, when would the Italians have got beyond the fallacies of federal republics, leagues of princes, provincial autonomy, insular home-rule, and all the other dreams of independence reft of its only safeguard which possessed the minds of patriots of every party in Italy and of nearly every well-wisher to ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... 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
... "tree of Paradise," crape-myrtle, guava, lime, orange, citron, pomegranate, sago-palm and many others whose home is in the tropics. The delicious climate of this island, several degrees warmer than that of the main land in the same latitude, enabled the proprietors of this insular Paradise to grow nearly all the fruits of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... played a baneful part in embittering the feud. Pitt and Grenville shrouded themselves in their insular and innate austerity. They judged the English Radical clubs too harshly; they ascribed to those who congratulated the Convention on 28th November treasonable aims which can scarcely have arisen in England when the addresses were drawn up. Apart from frothy republican talk, which ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... III B. 49, British Museum.... The document is in a French record hand, and the writer was evidently little versed in the insular script. He uses both ...
— Selections from early Middle English, 1130-1250 - Part I: Texts • Various
... 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 message in a tone of voice that has the charm ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unorganized territory of the US; administered by the Office of Insular Affairs, US Department ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... know then, what now I know, that, besides the desire of celebrating the forthcoming birth of an heir, my father had another and still more secret object—that of throwing dust in the eyes of his advocates, bankers, and insular councillors, who (having expected him to make money for them by magic) were beginning to whisper that all was not ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... as a dangerous amusement. Many of the miners pulled down their tents, and began to work upon the spots on which they previously stood. Others began to dig all round their wooden huts, until these rude domiciles threatened to become insular, and a few pulled their dwellings down in order to get at the ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... south-west of the Azores, experienced frequent earthquakes. More than two hundred shocks were felt from the month of May 1811, to April 1812, at St. Vincent; one of the three islands in which there are still active volcanoes. The commotion was not circumscribed to the insular portion of eastern America; and from the 16th of December, 1811, till the year 1813, the earth was almost incessantly agitated in the valleys of the Mississippi, the Arkansas river, and the Ohio. The oscillations were more feeble on the east of the Alleghanies, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... personification of 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
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Hoy Sound, the shortest and orthodox route, and this caused us to miss the proper sea view of the "Old Man of Hoy," which the steamboat from Stromness to Thurso always passed in close proximity, but we could perceive it in the distance as an insular Pillar of Rock, standing 450 feet high with rocks in vicinity rising 1,000 feet, although we could not see the arch beneath, which gives it the appearance of standing on two legs, and hence the name given to the rock by the sailors. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... 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 of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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 ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... existence. When I got to know M. Bayol better during our evening tramps up and down the deck, he asked me confidentially what remedies I adopted when "ronge de spleen," and how I combated the attacks of this deplorable but peculiarly insular disease, and was clearly incredulous when I failed to understand him. This amazing man also told me that he had been married five times. Not one of his first four wives had been able to withstand the unhealthy climate of Pondicherry for more than eighteen months, so, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... infant son Lancelot. Returning, she discovered him in the arms of the nymph Vivian, the mistress of Merlin, who on her approach sprung with the child into a deep lake and disappeared. This lake is held by some to be the lake Linius, a wide insular water near the sea-coast, in the regions of Linius or "The Lake;" now called Martin Mere or Mar-tain-moir, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the physical history of the world when the patches of land already raised above the water became so united as to form large islands; and though the aspect of the earth retained its insular character, yet the size of the islands, their tendency to coalesce by the addition of constantly increasing deposits, and thus to spread into wider expanses of dry land, marked the advance toward the formation of continents. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... burglar solar cedar jugular scholar calendar secular dollar grammar tabular poplar pillar sugar jocular globular mortar lunar vulgar popular insular Templar ocular muscular nectar similar tubular altar ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... other Eastern pygmies into two divisions—insular and continental—and no authors find fault with this classification. Only in fixing the distribution of the Negritos do the authorities differ. The islands admitted by everybody to contain Negritos to-day may be eliminated ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... lived. He combined the vision and administrative genius of Clive and Hastings with the audacity and energy of Hawkins and Drake. It was his dream, to use his own words, "to make Java the center of an Eastern insular empire" ruled "not only without fear but without reproach"; an empire to consist of that great archipelago—Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Celebes, New Guinea, and the lesser islands—which sweeps southward and eastward from the Asian mainland to the edges of Australasia. Though ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... as will be seen, is not to be included in the Danish archipelago. The peninsula is divided between Denmark and Germany (Schleswig-Holstein). The Danish portion is the northern and the greater, and is called Jutland (Dan. Jylland). Its northern part is actually insular, divided from the mainland by the Limfjord or Liimfjord, which communicates with the North Sea to the west and the Cattegat to the east, but this strait, though broad and possessing lacustrine characteristics ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... his usual penetration when he says that English humour "far from agreeable, and bitter in taste, like their own beverages, abounds in Dickens. French sprightliness, joy, and gaiety is a kind of good wine only grown in the lands of the sun. In its insular state it leaves an aftertaste of vinegar. The man who jests here is seldom kindly and never happy; he feels and censures the inequalities of life." On the contrary, we are inclined to think that French humour is fully as severe as English—they have such sayings as that "a man ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... The Sicilians at the same time determined to separate entirely from Naples and the rest of the peninsula; "and thus all the ability and spirit, the arms and wealth, of that powerful island were applied to the effort for insular independence, and drawn off from that for the independence of the nation." From Tuscany there went to this national war "about three thousand volunteers, and perhaps as many more regulars"—a number so small that Farini apologizes for it, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... that first and worst of all the penalties remained as yet in the oblivion to which he had consigned it. But in recompense for this, there was a very black cloud darkening the horizon of 1554. The Queen had announced to her Parliament her intended marriage with Prince Philip of Spain. All the old insular prejudices against foreigners rose up to strengthen the Protestant horror of a Spanish and Popish King. The very children in the streets were heard to cry, "Down with the Pope and the Spaniards!" Elizabeth would have known how to deal with such an emergency. But ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... Her French was of the British school-girl variety, grammatically precise, but with a hopeless, insular accent. After a few attempts Stefan had ceased trying to speak it with her. "Darling," he had begged, "don't let us—it is the ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... combatants was not an 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... describes Zayla as "a small island, on the very coast of Adel." To reconcile 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
... isle, eyot, holm, islet; atoll. Associated Words: insular, insularity, archipelago, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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
... a petition from certain citizens of London, praying for the total abolition of transportation. He declared that no opposition, derision, or contempt, should daunt him. He advised the establishment of insular penitentiaries in the neighbourhood of Great Britain, and he moved that the punishment of transportation should be abolished immediately, completely, and finally.[232] The Bishop of Exeter, always in antagonism to Dr. Whately, asserted that his representations ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... best he would do was to give us food, which he did, and direct me as to the safest portion of the is-land upon which to attempt a landing, though even as he told me I am sure that he thought my request for information but a blind to deceive him as to my true knowledge of the insular stronghold. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 it ought ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the book, to which accordingly we need here only allude—can be denied by nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... are provided. The great space which can usually be allotted, in a country like this, to institutions of this description, may perhaps give this hospital an advantage over one situated in the centre of a large city like London; though the semi-insular position of Boston must render space there comparatively valuable; but even this cannot take away from the merit of the people in showing such attention to the comforts of the needy sick. But what papa was most pleased with, was the provision made, on the plan which ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... house of Montalais—gratified and surprised the confirmed Parisian. For that was just what the good man was at heart and would be till he died, the form in which environment of younger years had moulded him: less French than Parisian, sharing the almost insular ignorance of life in the provinces characteristic of the native boulevardier; to whom the sun is truly nothing more or less than a spotlight focussed exclusively on Paris, leaving the rest of France in a sort of crepuscular gloom, the world ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... it: hill after hill came up into view, at a distance looking like islands, which indeed many of them were; but, on a nearer approach, the parts connecting the others became visible, and the mainland of this vast insular continent gradually revealed itself ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... circumstances. But, as he has said elsewhere, 'How little they know of England who only England know.'" (At this point I reached out a foot and trod hard on Verinder's toe.) "And to the broader outlook—I speak as a pretty wide traveller—this insular absorption in a mere game ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... of moving and poignant interest. He must once have been a magnificent fellow, and even now, with strength and will-power impaired, he was a man among men, full of quick courage and of a haughty temper. It was ever a word and a blow with him, and a fight to the desperate finish. He was insular, imperious and aggressive, and he ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Aia, signifies a district or province; and, as most provinces in Egypt were insular, it is often taken for an island. In other parts it was of much the same purport as [Greek: aia] of the Greeks, and betokened any [353]region or country. It was from hence that so many places have been represented by the Greeks as plurals, and ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... 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 ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... petty enterprises were undertaken. While Sir Henry Clinton was absent, Knyphausen was at first occupied in making preparations for the defence of that city? for, by the extreme severity of the winter, New York was deprived of that natural defence which arises from its insular situation. The Hudson, called the North River, was so completely covered with thick ice that a large army, with heavy artillery and baggage, might have crossed it with ease, and by that means have approached the very walls of the city. Knyphausen expected that Washington ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... data the 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhone and the Garonne, it exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious sees of Southern Gaul were filled ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Cockney price-current. They came, they saw, they made their books, but no man got from them any correct idea of what the Great Republic meant in the history of civilization. For this the British people had to wait until De Tocqueville, a Frenchman, made it in some degree palpable to insular comprehension. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... exciting 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 of the ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... from having considered the peculiar advantages, which this country has enjoyed, passes in rapid transition to the uses, which we have made of these advantages. We have been preserved by our insular situation, from suffering the actual horrors of War ourselves, and we have shewn our gratitude to Providence for this immunity by our eagerness to spread those horrors over nations less happily situated. In the midst of plenty and safety we have raised ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the squire kept a rigid silence, except that he had long conferences with my father; and Lady Jane kept her room. It was indeed a very sore subject. The squire wanted to start for Monte Carlo at once; but he was singularly insular, detested travel, and in truth was very unfit for such a "cutting-out expedition" as was contemplated. He waited, half out of his mind with anxiety, but in hopes of a better report; what he hoped for was that luck would turn, and Richard lose ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is speculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion; while the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of ignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would deny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature is richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far rasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple than to suggest the sort ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... heights. At the same time Lieutenant-Colonel Don Juan Creagh, commanding the Infantry Battalion, accompanied by a volunteer, Don Vicente Siera, Lieutenant of the local corps (fixo) of Cuba, led thirty of his men and fifty Rozadores [Footnote: The insular name of an irregular corps, now done away with. Literally taken, the word means sicklemen.] belonging to the city of La Laguna. They proceeded across country in order to reconnoitre the enemy's rear. Before nightfall they succeeded in occupying high ground ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... deplorable. It has produced endless friction and has strained the resources of two great Empires; but the allegation of Russian perfidy in the Merv affair may be left to those who look at facts solely from the insular standpoint. In the eyes of patriotic Russians England was the offender, first by opposing Muscovite policy tooth and nail in the Balkans, secondly by seizing Egypt, and thirdly by refusing to withdraw from that commanding position. The important fact to notice is that after each of these provocations ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... to remind The younger here of our ethereal band And hierarchy of Intelligences, That this thwart Parliament whose moods we watch— So insular, empiric, un-ideal— May figure forth in sharp and salient lines To retrospective eyes of afterdays, And print its legend large on History. For one cause—if I read the signs aright— To-night's appearance of its Minister In the assembly ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... enabling it to do its duty in, and to, the country. It tells of the legal recognition of the Church in the country long before the State existed; it expresses the legal declaration that the Church of England is not a mere insular sect, but part of the Universal Church "throughout all the world". A State can, of course, if it chooses, establish and {11} endow any religion—Mohammedan, Hindoo, Christian, in a country. It can establish Presbyterianism or Quakerism ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... 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 the removal ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... forms, together 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 Phoenicians, asserted by Diodorus,[5123] is entirely borne ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... nothing.[13] Thus, the resolve of Catharine to give nothing but fair words being already surmised, the emigres found to their annoyance that Pitt's passivity clogged their efforts—the chief reason why they shrilly upbraided him for his insular egotism. Certainly his attitude was far from romantic; but surely, after the sharp lesson which he had received from the House of Commons in the spring of 1791 during the dispute with Russia, caution was needful; ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose |
