Time & Perspective Quote by William Shenstone

Patriotism, Shenstone implies, is easiest to perform when it is untested. The shrewder move is to export yourself. “The proper means” sounds almost medicinal, like he’s prescribing exile as a corrective to lazy, inherited loyalty. For a mid-18th-century English poet, that’s a neat inversion: instead of treating travel as a threat to national feeling (the fear of “going continental” and coming back too French), he treats it as the only way to make affection honest.

The line works because it understands love of country as comparative, not absolute. You can’t really feel the contours of home until you’ve lived inside someone else’s normal. A foreign country supplies friction: different manners, different laws, different assumptions about class, religion, and taste. That friction produces clarity. It can inflate pride (I miss our liberties, our food, our humor) or sharpen critique (why do they do public life better than we do?). Either way, it moves “native country” from abstraction to chosen attachment.

There’s also a subtle jab at parochial nationalism: if your devotion collapses the moment you leave, it wasn’t devotion, it was habit. Shenstone’s Britain sat in an era of expanding empire and “Grand Tour” self-fashioning; travel was status, education, and often moral theater. He cuts through that performance and argues for something more destabilizing: live elsewhere long enough to be lonely, irritated, impressed, and changed. Only then does love of home become more than reflex - it becomes informed, and therefore harder to manipulate.