"British Isles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sending a Commission to investigate industrial conditions in the British Isles. Mr. LLOYD GEORGE, we understand, has courteously offered to try to keep one or two industries going until the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... air and sea forces will take stations in the British Isles—which constitute an essential fortress in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... 'Lindenius Renovatus.' Dr. E. T. Withington's 'Medical History from the Earliest Times,' octavo, 1894, is useful for reference; whilst Dr. Norman Moore has recently produced (Oxford, 1908) a 'History of the Study of Medicine in the British Isles.' Dr. E. J. Waring's 'Bibliotheca Therapeutica' was published in two octavo volumes by the New Sydenham Society in 1878-79. It is a list of the books which have been written on each individual drug, classes of medicines, and general therapeutics. There is an index of authors. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... centuries, they still retained their individuality as a peculiar people. They were to the conquered races of the country what the Romans were to the barbarous hordes of the Empire, or the Normans to the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles. Clustering around the throne, they formed an invincible phalanx, to shield it alike from secret conspiracy and open insurrection. Though living chiefly in the capital, they were also distributed throughout the country in all its high ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... every condition of society. From the cultured East, with all the advantages which wealth and educational facilities can give to her sons, they flocked; from the South, with her pride of ancestry, they came; even the British Isles contributed their quota. There was something in the primitive West of a generation or more ago which satisfied them. Nowhere else could it be found, and once they adapted themselves to existing conditions, they were loath to return ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... existed in the British Isles; Arthur's Seat, near Edinburgh, for instance, appears to be the funnel of a small volcano, belonging ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... been one of those violent changes in the weather with which the denizens of the British Isles are not altogether unfamiliar; a heavy storm had come shrieking down the North Sea, and though the rain had ceased about eleven o'clock the wind had blown hard all through the night, bringing with it from the Arctic a driving ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... firmly established family practices, whose position is more secure than Mr. Dane-Latimer's. And there are some whose reputation stands higher in legal circles. But there is probably no solicitor whose name is better known all over the British Isles than Mr. Dane-Latimer's. He has been fortunate enough to become a kind of specialist in "Society" cases. No divorce suit can be regarded as really fashionable unless Mr. Dane-Latimer is acting in it for plaintiff, defendant, or co-respondent. A politician who has been libelled goes ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... they are, in the eye of pure reason, better qualified—nothing but trouble can come of such a disposition. Ireland, which in George Henry Moore's time was the most aristocratically governed part of the British Isles, is now by far more democratic, at all events, than England: the poor man is on a level with the rich, and means to stay there. Those who want to go into Irish politics, under Home Rule as now, must take their chances ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... work in earnest to confiscate all vessels and cargoes captured on their way from any neutral nation to any port within the proscribed district. On November 21, next following, Napoleon retaliated by the Berlin decree, so called, declaring the entire British Isles to be under blockade, and forbidding any vessel which had been in any English port after publication of his decree to enter any port in the dominions under his control. In January, 1807, England made the ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... bungalows, and artists' studios. As an art centre it has played, and is still playing, a very considerable part, while many of the native models of the place look out from gilded frames in half the picture galleries of Europe. It must unquestionably be the most painted spot in the British Isles, and it would be difficult to find a single nook or corner that has not been depicted on paper or canvas. One of the curious little streets bears the exotic name of "Rue des Beaux Arts", a reminder of the fact that it was in a dwelling of this street that ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... been animal life in Europe in Quaternary times. "Grand indeed," cries Hugh Miller, "was the fauna of the British Isles in those days. Tigers, as large again as the biggest Asiatic species, lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants, of nearly twice the bulk of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or Ceylon, roamed in herds; at least two species of rhinoceros ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... amply sufficient to bring the war to an honorable issue. Our nation is in number more than half that of the British Isles. It is composed of a brave, a free, a virtuous, and an intelligent people. Our country abounds in the necessaries, the arts, and the comforts of life. A general prosperity is visible in the public countenance. The means employed by the British cabinet to undermine it have recoiled on themselves; ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... and that this differential was now being wiped out, forcing England to face tremendously serious problems for the future. He quoted a British minister as saying that means would have to be found to send six or seven millions of Englishmen out of the British Isles and closer to the sources of food production, if continental conditions ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... told that at one time the British Isles were connected with the mainland of Europe; that Italy was at least within sight of the African coast; and that westward from Gibraltar, there was a continent which ultimately sank beneath the waves, ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... Telford has observed, no person suspected, when the canal was laid out in 1805, "that steamboats would not only monopolise the trade of the Clyde, but penetrate into every creek where there is water to float them, in the British Isles and the continent of Europe, and be seen in every quarter of ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... previous novels in four respects. First, Trollope was accustomed to include in his novels his own witty editorial comments about various subjects, often paragraphs or even several pages long. No such comments are found in Nina. Second, the story is set in Prague instead of the British isles. Third, the hero and heroine are already in love and engaged to one another at the opening; we are not told any details about their falling in love. The hero, Anton Trendellsohn is a successful businessman in his mid- thirties—not the typical Trollopian hero in his early twenties, ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... souls alone are friends of ours In all the British isles; Who sorrow for our darkened hours And greet our luck with smiles. "And who may those twain outcasts be Whose favor ye have won?" The first is Queen of England's realm, The other that good ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... colonists contained in the venerable Landnama Book—the Book of Lots, the Doomsday of Iceland, and far livelier reading than that of the Conqueror—are those of Northmen who had been before settled in the British Isles. Our own country then was the great stepping-stone between Norway and Iceland; and this one fact is enough to account for the close connection which the Icelanders ever afterwards kept up with their kinsmen who had remained behind in the islands ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... more than any of his compeers, in bringing the importance of distribution in depth into notice; and his researches in the Aegean Sea, and still more his remarkable paper "On the Geological Relations of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles," published in 1846, in the first volume of the "Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain," attracted ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... and charge preposterous prices for them; they impose upon the young officer's softness or delicate gentlemanly feeling, and consider themselves smart for so doing. In this manner Gibraltar, with all its discomforts, is dearer than the most expensive and luxurious quarter in the British Isles. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... Scandinavians, Germans, Hollanders, and Huguenots—often more so. Such early families as the Welsh Shelbys, and Gaelic McAfees are no more English than are the Huguenot Seviers or the German Stoners. Even including merely the immigrants from the British Isles, the very fact that the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch, in a few generations, fuse with the English instead of each element remaining separate, makes the American population widely different from that of Britain; exactly as a flask of water is different from two cans ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the arrival of the British on the Continent. In using the term British, it is expressly intended to comprise the united forces of the British Isles. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Khan; being a narrative of his Journey from Delhi to Calcutta, and thence by Sea to England: containing his remarks upon the manners, customs, laws, constitutions, literature, arts, manufactures, &c., of the people of the British Isles. Translated from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... interlace in all primitive arts is very interesting. It undoubtedly began in an unconscious imitation of local architecture. For instance, in the British Isles, the building in earliest times was with wattles: practically walls of basket work. William of Malmsbury says that Glastonbury was "a mean structure of wattle work," while of the Monastery of Iona, it is related ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... degrees of temperature, although the mean of the two would be the same. And herein we have an explanation of what at first sight appear to be anomalies: we know, for instance, 'that plants will flourish perennially in the British isles which are killed by the frosts of winter in places lying considerably to the south upon the continent; thus the laurel, that bears our winters steadily in Ireland and the west of England, and is only affected by very severe frosts in our eastern counties, is killed by the winters of Berlin, equally ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... West had the Motor Maids motored, nor could their education by travel have been more wisely begun. But now a speaking acquaintance with their own country enriched their anticipation of an introduction to the British Isles. How they made their polite American bow and how they were received on the other side is a tale ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... navigators, and finally of the more pretentious, if vague and often misleading, world maps of learned geographers. If a sailor wished to navigate the Mediterranean and its adjacent waters, if he planned to sail up the coast of Europe to the British Isles and on into the Baltic, or to pass down the Atlantic coast of Africa to Cape Nun, he might rely on the maps and charts which the Italian geographers could furnish him. Or if he launched his galleys on the Red Sea he might use their ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... to the humblest abode in England (and in America) are to be found the descendants of these dominating barbarians who flooded the British Isles in the 5th Century. What sort of a race were they? Would we understand England to-day, we must understand them. It is not sufficient to know that they were bearded and stalwart, fair and ruddy, flaxen-haired and with cold blue eyes. We should know what sort of souls looked out of ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... people who lived in the British Isles long ago were not English. It will be simplest for us to call them all Celts and to divide them into two families, the Gaels and the Cymry. The Gaels lived in Ireland and in Scotland, and the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... stream of emigrants towards the Teutonic tract, the change of importance between south-east and north-west, since the industrial development of the coal country, and the more rapid rate of increase among the Celts, it becomes highly probable that not one-half the population of the British Isles is really of Teutonic descent. Moreover, it must be remembered that, whatever may have been the case in the primitive Anglo-Saxon period, intermarriages between Celts and Teutons have been common for at least four centuries past; and that therefore almost all Englishmen at the present day possess ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... necessary to Church life." For it is to be remembered that not only was there not an Anglican bishop exercising acknowledged jurisdiction in America before Seabury, but there was not an Anglican bishop anywhere outside of the British Isles. Our fathers, sending Seabury for consecration, awakened the English Church to the consciousness that it had a duty to the world in extending its episcopacy beyond the shadow of its cathedrals and palaces. For this great result, "so far beyond what they had hoped for," ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... west you could spread the British Isles out flat, and you would not cover Manitoba—with her new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay. It would take a country the size of France to cover the province of Saskatchewan, a country larger than Germany to cover Alberta, two countries ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... theory of the theosophist, for he crowds enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand years! A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps. Jogging along from ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... mutiny at the Nore shook and bewildered the British Isles. In the public journals and in Parliament it was declared that this outbreak, like that at Spithead, was due partly to political strife, but more extensively to agents of revolution from France ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Great Britain in European annals of which we know was the statement in the fifth century B. C. of the Greek historian Herodotus, that Ph[oe]nician sailors went to the British Isles for tin. He called them the "Tin Islands." The people with whom these sailors traded must have been Celts, for they were the first inhabitants of Britain who worked in metal instead ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... of Kent took her daughter to visit many of the chief cities, cathedrals, and other places of interest in the British Isles. Her first public act was to present the colours to a regiment of foot at Plymouth. An American writer has recorded that he saw the widowed lady and her little girl in the churchyard of Brading, in the Isle of Wight. They were seated ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... ago our shores were heavily invaded by the rising tide of an intense immigration from the British Isles and Continental Europe, the Church had to face conditions heretofore unknown. Without doubt, the most complex in its elements, the most serious in its consequences, was the Ruthenian issue. It was a case of providing for the spiritual wants of over a quarter of a million ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... Times" (1885), and "Darwinism" (1889) were written at Godalming, also the series of lectures which he gave in America in 1886-7 and at various towns in the British Isles. He also continued to have examination papers[43] to correct each year—and a very strenuous time that was. Our mother used to assist him in this work, and also with ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... quite unknown laws of fecundity, prepotency, and variability, what their final type would be, or, indeed, whether any particular type would ever prevail over diversity. And, without going beyond the natives of the British Isles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and short, straight-haired and curly, fair and dark, supremely intelligent and unteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what not. The natural ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... only the existence of the printing press which has, so to speak, stereotyped the languages of nations and prevented variations becoming fixed, variations and dialects which in days prior to the existence of printing presses were evolved into distinct languages. Take the British Isles for example, any part of them, Yorkshire, Scotland, Ireland, London, and note the difference between the spoken language of certain classes and the language as printed in newspapers and books. Given a nation isolated, or comparatively isolated, for many hundreds of years, it is ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... been expressed as to this. It has been estimated that the amount of heat arising from the stream on a winter's day, is sufficient to raise the atmosphere over the British Isles from the freezing point to ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... for half a century the teacher of Europe. He collected a large library of manuscripts; he was the author of some forty works, covering the whole field of human knowledge in his day; and to his school at Jarrow came hundreds of pupils from all parts of the British Isles, and hundreds more from the Continent. Of all his works the most notable is the so-called "Ecclesiastical History" (Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum) which should be named the "History of the Race of Angles." This book marks the beginning of our literature ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... composition with streams of lava which we know to have flowed from the craters of volcanoes. We find also similar basaltic and other igneous rocks associated with beds of TUFF in various parts of the British Isles, and forming DIKES, such as have been spoken of; and some of the strata through which these dikes cut are occasionally altered at the point of contact, as if they had been exposed to the intense heat of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... harbour by the besiegers. The citizens endured frightful hunger, for famine was extreme within the walls, but they never quailed. The garrison was reduced from 7,000 to 3,000. The siege, which lasted 105 days, and was the most memorable in the annals of the British Isles, was ended by the breaking of the boom by a squadron of three ships from England which brought ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... led, as early as 1729, to proposals for establishing a city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the upper James, as on the Rappahannock, speculative planters bought headrights and located settlers and tenants to hold their grants.[93:3] Into this region came natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered representatives of other lands, some of them coming up the James, others up the York, and still others arriving with the southward-moving current along both ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the human female soul is embodied in the children of Ham, Shem, and Japhet, the mighty law referred to is binding only upon that Anglo-British-Saxon-Norman division of Japhet's daughters domiciled in and emanating from the British Isles? Let us proudly reply that in considering the result of a process we consider the whole; and let us meekly add that to our mind the Anglo-British-Saxon-Norman woman, perfected under an American sky, is the woman of the world; and finally, let us point to the two-and-twenty heroines of that ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... of HER MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY, is entitled, equally from public interest and its own importance, to the first notice under this head.—The situation is everyway eligible for the marine residence of a sovereign of the British Isles: for it commands a most extensive and animated prospect, including Spithead and other naval stations: has a beautiful sea-beach (with a private landing-place); and is sheltered by extensive woods and plantations. The original seat was a plain family mansion surrounded by park-like grounds, which ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... sponges have been enumerated, ten or eleven of which are found in the British isles. A portion of these inhabit fresh water, among which we may mention the river sponge (S. fluviatilis), which abounds in the Thames. Among the British sponges, too, is the stinging or crumb-of-bread ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of its Kings or Queens, but it would be as absurd to trace those annals without extended study of the rulers and their characters as it would be to write the records without reference to the people and popular progress. And the Monarchy has done much for the British Isles. Its influence has effected their whole national life in war and in peace, in religion and in morals, in literature and in art. The individual achievements and actions of some of these rulers constitute the very foundation stones ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... Danishin habitants were driven over sea. In a few months their king, Hasculf, returned with a great fleet gathered from Norway, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, Man,—the last fleet of Northmen which descended on the British Isles,—but again the ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... seemed to the belligerent German patriot that all her possible foes were confused, divided within themselves, at an extremity of distraction and impotence. The British Isles seemed slipping steadily into civil war. Threat was met by counter-threat, violent fool competed with violent fool for the admiration of the world, the National Volunteers armed against the Ulster men; everything moved on with a kind of mechanical precision from parade and meeting ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... abundant crop in the central Mississippi Valley, but not near the coast; it is very prolific in Nebraska, but not in Dakota; it thrives in Italy, Austria, and the Balkan Peninsula, but not in the British Isles and Germany. It is a very important crop in Australia, and is the staple grain of Mexico. It is the crop of fourteen-hour ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... often undertaken again in such a very small craft as we accomplished it in; but there are many men, I have no doubt, who would gladly receive a hint as to the most advantageous form for a small boat in which they might safely adventure, alone, or with a friend, a cruise, say round the British Isles, or across the Channel and along the French coast; and therefore, as this story is written for the amusement only of such people as love boats, I think I may venture to trespass so far on my readers' patience as to give such a hint in the shape of a brief ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... have fought and suffered for their cause as no living man reformer in the British Isles has fought and suffered for his, have during the present crisis subordinated their claim to the urgent claims of national honor and safety. So Mr. Shaw, whose campaigning is done generally in the armchair, and never in any place more dangerous than the rostrum, ought surely ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... endeavour to keep them in order. All this and more did French tell the new recruits. But only a very few dropped out and throughout the years the force has attracted a fine class of men both from Canada and the British Isles. Young men from the towns and farms of the old Provinces, University Graduates and younger sons of the nobility in the Mother Land, men of birth and breeding and social advantage have always been in the ranks. But once ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... Romans to the Celts was "Galli" a term finally confined by them to the people of Gaul.[45] Successive bands of Celts went forth from this comparatively restricted territory, until the Celtic "empire" for some centuries before 300 B.C. included the British Isles, parts of the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, North Italy, Belgium, Holland, great part of Germany, and Austria. When the German tribes revolted, Celtic bands appeared in Asia Minor, and remained there as the Galatian Celts. Archaeological discoveries with a Celtic facies have ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... golf and did more drill, he would be all the better for it. I propose to report my doings with the professor on the links at some length, in order to refute this absurd view. Everybody ought to play golf, and nobody can begin it too soon. There ought not to be a single able-bodied infant in the British Isles who has not foozled a drive. To take my case. Suppose I had employed in drilling the hours I had spent in learning to handle my clubs. I might have drilled before the professor by the week without softening his heart. I might have ported arms and grounded arms and presented arms, and ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... up north and beach us on the British Isles? No. Much to my surprise, he went back down south and returned to European seas. As we swung around the Emerald Isle, I spotted Cape Clear for an instant, plus the lighthouse on Fastnet Rock that guides all those thousands of ships setting out ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... world sounded like the Arabian Nights or some fairy-tale. The whole world took fire. Cariboo was on every man's lips, as were Transvaal {46} and Klondike half a century later. The New England States, Canada, the Maritime Provinces, the British Isles—all were set agog by the reports of the new gold-camps where it was only necessary to dig to find nuggets. By way of Panama, by way of San Francisco, by way of Spokane, by way of Victoria, by way of Winnipeg and Edmonton came the gold-seekers, ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... put in such graceful language that whilst it challenges you, it commands your respect by its very gracefulness. But it is just this attitude based upon insufficient or false information which has ruined many a cause in the British Isles. The superficiality, the one-sidedness the inaccuracy and often even dishonesty that have crept into modern journalism, continuously mislead honest men who want to see nothing but justice done. Then there are always interested groups whose business it is to serve their ends by means of faul or ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... America interfere with our plan to starve England?" was the question I heard repeatedly. Their belief that they could starve England was absolute. What could be simpler than putting a ring of U-boats round the British Isles and cutting off all trade until the pangs of hunger should compel Britain to yield? I heard no talk then about the "base crime of starving women and children," which became their whine a year later when the knife began ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... Europe could not do for his body—placed it on the throne of these realms; and for Popery, what Popes and Cardinals strove in vain to do for three centuries—brought back its mummeries and nonsense into the temples of the British Isles. ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... atmosphere by its gravitative attraction differs utterly, in potentiality and importance, from the numerous lumps of matter scattered throughout space, which, though they may be as large as a haystack or a mountain or as the British Isles, or even Europe, are yet too small to hold any trace of air to their surface, and therefore cannot in any intelligible sense of the word be regarded as habitable. One of the lumps of matter in space can become a habitable planet only when it has attained a certain size, which ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... than Poetry!" But its duties are far from heavy, and can be adjusted pretty much as the holder pleases. And as a position it is unique. It is, though not of extreme antiquity, the oldest purely literary Professorship in the British Isles; and it remained, till long after Mr Arnold's time, the only one of the kind in the two great English Universities. In consequence partly of the regulation that it can be held for ten years only—nominally five, with a practically invariable re-election ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... a species of disgrace for a man not to be married. It perhaps ought to be so everywhere; but our social system of Europe is become now so bad, that nearly half of the people cannot afford to marry. And so degraded in their feelings have become the lower classes of the British Isles, that many of those who do marry, marry with the clear understood determination of throwing their offspring upon the public bounty. The Puseyite and Church alms-giving clergy, to their shame, encourage our miserable population in these ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... revival, too, is discovering not only the love of song, but, to some extent, the power of improvisation in the more remote corners of the British Isles. Instances of popular balladry in the west of Ireland are givrn by Lady Gregory in her Poets ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... to the Press Bureau and our landing, there was nothing in that landing, as I have just said, which need have caused sorrow to a soul in the British Isles excepting, of course, the deplorable heavy casualties which are inseparable now from making any attack. But, on the 23rd of August a correspondent cables to an American paper a sensational story of a decisive victory, which the Press Bureau must have known to be a tissue of lies. Had the ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... over the practical inaccessibility and the lack of amenity of Nauheim, whither they had despatched me unwilling in dreary summers before the war, and while they were suggesting even more depressing health resorts in the British Isles, it occurred to me to ask them whether Royat-les-Bains did not contain broken-down heart repairing works of the first order. They ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the Lord druv down Creation's spiles 'Thout no gret helpin' from the British Isles, An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff; I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the Storthing so early as 1821, at which time a law was also passed forbidding the king to create a new nobility. Nevertheless, the thought occurs to us that these are the descendants of those Northmen of whom one branch, under the name of Normans, conquered the British Isles, and founded the very nobility there which is the present boast and ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... of intercommunication by letter, and banks and financial houses will gradually realize that large savings can be made by utilizing air mails for the transaction of business. A difficulty lies in the fact that the area of the British Isles is not very favourable for an extensive air mail service, which can only operate by day, since by the existing means of transport mails are carried during the out-of-business hours and can generally reach their destination in a night, while the distances to Paris and Brussels ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... methods.... In its earliest age it included far more of the Eastern world than it has since; in these later times it has taken into its compass a new hemisphere; in the Middle Ages it lost Africa, Egypt and Syria, and extended itself to Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles. At one time its territory was flooded by strange and barbarous races, but the existing civilisation was vigorous enough to vivify what threatened to stifle it, and to assimilate to the old social forms what came ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... advance was begun about 6 a. m., preceded by a short but fierce bombardment of the German line, and which according to the account afterward given by prisoners caused the Germans to seek the shelter of their dugouts. Troops from the British Isles and Canada who made the advance together were among the Germans before the latter could issue from their shelters after the withering storm of shells. At different places savage hand-to-hand fighting went ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... on in proper chronological order the history of the witch delusion in the British isles, it will be necessary to examine into what was taking place in Scotland during all that part of the sixteenth century anterior to the accession of James VI. to the crown of England. We naturally expect that the Scotch—a people renowned from the earliest times for their powers of imagination—should ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... by the height of the surface above sea-level, since the country, taken as a whole, is simply an extensive table-land. The height of the plain in the two central states, Mexico and Puebla, is 8,000 feet, or about double the average height of the highest summits in the British Isles. On the west of the republic is a continuous chain of mountains, and on the east of the table-land run a series of mountainous groups parallel to the seacoast, with a summit in Vera Cruz of over 13,400 feet. To the south of the capital an irregular range running east and west contains these ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... parted with even eleven shillings, for he was not a rich man. Indeed, with the single exception of the Earl of Wetherby, whose finances were so irregular that he could not be said to possess an income at all, he was the poorest man of his rank in the British Isles. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... geographical tables with the British isles; and here is one of his greatest errors. According to him, the north part of Britain stretches to the east, instead of to the north: the Mull of Galloway is the most northern promontory, and the land from it bends due east. The Western Islands run east and ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... people. The tide of invasion had been rolled back after the bloodiest and most stubbornly contested field of the war. The numbers on each side differed but little from the numbers engaged at Waterloo, and the tenacity with which the soldiers of the British Isles stood that day against the hosts of Napoleon, was rivaled on the field of Gettysburg by men of the same blood, fighting in the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... very embarrassing addition to it, since the rhyme tells against the parent, and the story is intended to tell against the ungrateful children. The existence of the tale in India renders it likely enough that it is not indigenous to the British Isles, but an Oriental importation. It is obvious, therefore, that it cannot be used as anthropological evidence of the existence of the primitive customs to be found in it. The whole incident, indeed, is a ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... century before Christ, and it may render the same high service to English poetry to-day or to-morow. The rise of Provincial schools of literature, interpreting local life in local idiom, in all parts of the British Isles and in the Britain beyond the seas, is a goal worth striving for; such a literature, so far from impeding the progress of the literature in the standard tongue, would serve only to enrich it in spirit, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... frightful end thrown on every one but himself: the fact being that Essex's end was brought on by his having chosen one Sunday morning for breaking out into open rebellion, for the purpose of seizing the city of London and the Queen's person, and compelling her to make him lord and master of the British Isles; in which attempt he and his fought with the civil and military authorities, till artillery had to be brought up and many lives were lost. Such little escapades may be pardonable enough in 'noble ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... after bitter strife, the Teutons have attained supremacy. The "Teutonic Peoples" are "the English speaking inhabitants of the British Isles, the German speaking inhabitants of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland, the Flemish speaking inhabitants of Belgium, the Scandinavian inhabitants of Sweden and Norway and practically all of the inhabitants of ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... gladsome, and visitors came back refreshed and improved to the cottage. And now comes the strange part of the story—this healthy retired sporting farmer was in correspondence with the greatest and cleverest men in the British Isles, and the most masterly criticisms of literature were exchanged with a lavish freedom which seems impossible to us in the days of the post-card and the hurried gasping telegram. In our day there is absolutely no time for that leisurely conscientious study which was usual in ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... rage, charging through thick and thin, has had a fascination for me as long as I can remember. The true aurochs and this, the European Bison, ceased to exist in the British Isles, except in the Zoological Gardens; but the latter is still found wild in Lithuania, and is also carefully preserved in other parts of Russia, of which the Emperor has a herd. There is much talk about their being untamable—that they will not mix with tame cattle—that tame cows shrink from the aurochs' ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... the eighteenth century essayists, with Steele and Addison at the head of them, had developed the art of character-delineation, a development out of which the novelists were to make their profit. The influence of the English eighteenth-century essay on the growth of prose-fiction, not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent of Europe, is larger than is generally admitted. Indeed, there is a sense in which the successive papers depicting the character and the deeds of Sir Roger de Coverley may be accepted as the earliest of ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... of Chinese inns are far and away worse than anything the traveler would be called upon to encounter anywhere in the British Isles, even in the most isolated places in rural Ireland. There can be no comparison. And my reader will understand that there is much which the European misses in the way of general physical comfort and cleanliness. Sanitation is absent in toto. Ordinary decency forbids ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... of the sea grew more and more serious, this flight by airship became a common spectacle over all the lower-lying parts of Europe, and in the British Isles. But, in the midst of it, the heavens opened their flood-gates, as they had done in the New World, and then the aeros, flooded with rain, and hurled about by contending blasts of wind, drooped, fluttered, and fell by hundreds into ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... and we left, in actual counted dead Turkish bodies, more than double our own casualties (killed, wounded, and missing). But, above all, we definitely impressed the German mind with the fact that Great Britain did not only mean the British Isles but the equally loyal and brave fighters from ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... held the land before the advent of the ancient Britons, were themselves immigrants; the very Autochthones in person turn out, on close inspection, to be vagabonds and wanderers and foreign colonists. In short, man as a whole is not an indigenous animal at all in the British Isles. Be he who he may, when we push his pedigree back to its prime original, we find him always arriving in the end by the Dover steamer or the Harwich packet. Five years, in fact, are quite sufficient to give him a legal title to letters of naturalisation, unless indeed he be a German ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Spain, Belgium and the British Isles, in some two hundred poems from about ninety poets. Some thirty, not originally written in English, are given in both the original and the best ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... bookshelf, where he looked to see the life of Jesse James, he was astonished and somewhat reassured to discover a title like "Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone of the British Isles." It was unlikely, he reasoned, that a man who voluntarily read, for instance, "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States," would split his skull when his back was turned. Yet they smacked of affectation to Sprudell, who associated ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... leave an area uncovered in the East bigger than the German Empire. England spread out flat would just cover the maritime provinces. Quebec stands a third bigger than Germany, Ontario a third bigger than France; and you still have a western world as large again as the East. Spread the British Isles flat, they would barely cover Manitoba. France and Germany would not equal Saskatchewan and Alberta; and two Germanies would not cover British Columbia—leaving undefined Yukon and MacKenzie River ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... forgetfulness of the tenet which had long been her peculiar boast. The old Cavaliers would have flocked to the royal standard. There would probably have been in all the three kingdoms a civil war as long and fierce as that of the preceding generation. While that war was raging in the British Isles, what might not Lewis attempt on the Continent? And what hope would there be for Holland, drained of her troops and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... exceptionally fortunate in their choice of a house. If, as runs the modern theory, beautiful surroundings in our early youth are of the utmost importance in training our perceptions and aiding the growth of our higher selves, then surely nowhere in the British Isles could a more suitable setting have been found for a home of education. The long terrace commanded a view of the whole of the Craigwen Valley, an expanse of about sixteen miles. The river, like a silver ribbon, ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... intelligence is far less serious than the estrangement between the governing body and the real feeling of the mass of the people. To many observers this latter estrangement seems to be drifting very rapidly towards a social explosion in the British Isles. The organised masses of labour find themselves baffled both by their parliamentary representatives and by their trade union officials. They are losing faith in their votes and falling back in anger upon insurrectionary ideals, upon the idea of a general ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... from shore to shore. In the same way, there was perhaps a solid causeway of land from Canada to Europe reaching out across the Northern Atlantic. Baffin Island and other islands of the Canadian North Sea, the great sub-continent of Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the British Isles, all formed part of this ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... of the Pretender, and succeeded so far as to bring the Chevalier to Scotland. The Duke of Argyll, however, fought his forces, and though the victory remained undecided, Mar was compelled to seek safety in France. The rebellion caused so much disturbance in every part of the British Isles that Ireland suffered greatly from bad ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... that are served for breakfast in the British Isles; they replace the American pancake and for tea replace our hot biscuits. Many varieties of scones are made in Scotland. Currants, citron and raisins are used in the dough, while in other parts of the United Kingdom these cakes are split, buttered and served ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... Greek and Italian states. Still other tribes seem to have poured in successive waves into Central Europe. The vanguard of these peoples are known as the Celts. After them came the Teutonic tribes, who crowded the former out on the westernmost edge of Europe—into Gaul and Spain, and out upon the British Isles. These hard-pressed Celts are represented to-day by the Welsh, the Irish, and the Highland Scots. Behind the Teutonic peoples were the Slavonic folk, who pushed the former hard against the Celts, and, when they could urge them no farther to the west, finally settled down and became the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... skipper, he was himself the absolute master. The boat carried the aforesaid skipper, three hands, and a steward, and with them he had twice been up the Mediterranean, across to Norway, and had several times made the circuit of the British Isles. ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... York meeting of the British Association in 1831, eloquently announced "that when Playfair, in one of his admirable papers in the Edinburgh Review, expressed a fear that the increasing taste for analytical science would at length drive the {58} ancient geometry from its favoured retreat in the British Isles; the Professor seemed not to be aware that there existed a devoted band of men in the north, resolutely bound to the pure and ancient forms of geometry, who in the midst of the tumult of steam engines, cultivated it with unyielding ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... platform in the pursuit or diffusion of knowledge; but when she is employed upon the stage to minister to everything that pollutes and degrades man, no voice was raised against it. It was but a few years ago that a French queen brought over with her to the British Isles, a male mantua-maker. It was not supposed then that woman was capable of fitting woman's clothes properly. She has since advanced to have the charge of man's wardrobe; and it will be right when the time comes, for man to take care of himself. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... more skilfully bred, more tenderly treated, and cared for with a more solicitous pride than was the case a generation ago. There are fewer mongrels in our midst, and the family dog has become a respectable member of society. Two million dog licences were taken out in the British Isles in the course of 1909. In that year, too, as many as 906 separate dog shows were sanctioned by the Kennel Club and held in various parts of the United Kingdom. At the present time there exist no fewer than 156 specialist clubs established for the ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... colours. As yet the policy of commercial exclusion had not been carried to any great length, but the Berlin decree issued by Napoleon on November 21 after the battle of Jena proclaimed the whole of the British Isles to be in a state of blockade, prohibited all commerce with them from the ports of France and her dependent states, confiscated all British merchandise in such ports, and declared all British subjects in countries occupied by French troops to be prisoners of war. Howick replied ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the Prince of Parma, did not even 'permit him to assist the Queen of England with his tears, as he needed them all to weep over his own misfortunes,' the Spanish fleet left the Tagus and sailed towards the British isles." [Mignet.] ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... The folk-lore of the British Isles abounds with quaint beliefs and stories concerning birds. There is a charming Welsh legend concerning the robin, which the Rev. T. F. T. DYER quotes from Notes and Queries:—"Far, far away, is a land of woe, darkness, spirits of evil, and ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... last step of the grand stairway when four big plain-clothes men, pounced upon me. I had to do some swift thinking. I could have flung the chemicals in their faces and escaped, but I knew I could never get outside of the British Isles without being caught—outside of Glasgow for that matter. Such resistance would only incriminate matters still more, so I let my hand fall down to my side. More for the fun of it than anything else, I guess, I got on my horse and demanded ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... be some who refuse to take seriously a person like Albert de Chantonnay because, forsooth, he happened to possess a sense of the picturesque. There are, as a matter of fact, thousands of sensible persons in the British Isles who fail completely to understand the average Frenchman. To the English comprehension it is, for instance, surprising that in time of stress—when Paris was besieged by a German army—a hundred franc-tireur corps ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the journey. Even his flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little town and going on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his mind. The guard ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... such as the man who candidly wrote from New Brunswick in 1788, 'I have made one great mistake in politics, for which reason I never intend to make so great a blunder again.' Many espoused the cause because they were natives of the British Isles, and had not become thoroughly saturated with American ideas: of the claimants for compensation before the Royal Commissioners after the war almost two-thirds were persons who had been born in England, Scotland, or ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... September the 23d, and that we were near two months out of Groix with this tub of an Indiaman. In all that time we had not so much as got a whiff of an English frigate, though we had almost put a belt around the British Isles. Then straining my eyes through the mist, I made out two white blurs of sails ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... elevations and depressions on the surface. Secondly, one should take any place as centre, and draw about it circles of 50 or 100 miles radius, and see what lies within them; and note the extent of the influence exerted by the central point. At the same time, one should always compare the British Isles to scale. For instance, the Aegean is about as big as Britain; while the smallness of Judaea is remarkable. After the Exile, the Jewish part was about as big as the county of Gloucester. How few boys realise this, though ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... European variety of the above species, breeding commonly both in the British Isles and northern Europe. This species is given a place in our avifauna because of its accidental ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed |
