At first, indeed,
he let everybody in; he had a perfect passion for being conquered, and
Romans, Teutons, Danes, and Normans in succession plucked and ate the
apple of England. But with the coming of age of that national
consciousness, the bonds of which have never been snapped, the English
entered on their lucky and courageous career of keeping things out. They
possess in London the only European capital that has never in the modern
period been captured by an invader. They withstood the intellectual
grandeur of Roman Law, and developed their own medley of customs into
the most eccentric and most equitable system in the world. They kept out
the Council of Trent, and the Spanish Armada. 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.
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