The Isle within itself hath almost none but imaginary bounds of separation, without but one common limit or rather guard of the Ocean sea, making the whole a little world within itself, the nations an uniformity of constitutions both of body and mind, especially in martial processes, a community of language (the principal means of civil society), an unity of religion (the deepest bond of hearty union and the surest knot of lasting peace).

Countries are not laid up in heaven; they are shaped and reshaped here on earth by the strategems of men and the victories of the fortuitous. But once they take root and are bolstered by the habits and mechanics of unity and by a common mythology, they soon acquire an image, if not of immemoriality, at least of almost inevitable and organic development.