And mark how Shakespeare causes one and all of his patriots to congratulate themselves that Britain is an island. Tennyson has called upon his countrymen to
'Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set His Briton in blown seas and storming showers;'
and elsewhere has made a 'Tory member's elder son' say--
'God bless the narrow sea... Which keeps our Britain whole within herself.'
Thomson, too, tells how 'the rushing flood' turned 'this favoured isle' 'flashing from the continent aside,' 'its guardian she.' But Shakespeare had been before both in these expressions of gratitude for our insularity. The Archduke of Austria, in 'King John,' speaks of England as
'That pale, that white-faced shore, Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides, And coops from other lands her islanders... That England, hedged in with the main, That water-wallèd bulwark, still secure And confident from foreign purposes.'
So, in 'Richard II.,' John of Gaunt describes England as
'This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war.
'In the office of a wall, Or, as a moat, defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands;
'Bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune.'
There is one thing, however, without which, in Shakespeare's view, even our lucky isolation cannot avail to save us, as a nation, from destruction. 'If they (the English) were true within themselves they need not to fear, although all nations were set against them.' So wrote Andrew Borde, when Henry VIII. was King; and in the old play of 'John, King of England' the author made one of his _personæ_ say:
'Let England live but true within itself, And all the world can never wrong her state.'
So Shakespeare, when he came to treat of the same subject, made the Bastard declare that
'This England never did, nor never shall Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself... Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true.'
There is much virtue in an 'if,' and the poet repeats the warning in another play. In '3 Henry VI.' Hastings says:
'Why, knows not Montague that of itself England is safe, if true within itself?'