Daniel Defoe - Page of "A Sketch of Old England" with fragment from Defoe's "The True-Born Englishman" lyrics

The national pride of this people appears rather founded on a harsh and arrogant contempt for others, than a consciousness produced by internal conviction; and their standard of moral and intellectual excellence seems fixed by the simple expedient of placing every other nation as low as possible in the scale of humanity. They are still exactly what one of their own writers described them more than a hundred years ago: “No panegyric needs his praise record, An Englishmen ne'er wants his own good word; And to illustrate first his own good name, He never fails his neighbor to defame.” Your true-born Englishman, raised and nurtured in the hotbed of homebred conceit, and pampered with his own praises, seems of opinion that a man cannot love his country, without hating and abusing every other.