Date: 1746

"Social friends, / Attuned to happy unison of soul; / To whose exalting eye a fairer world, / Of which the vulgar never had a glimpse, / Displays its charms; whose minds are richly fraught / With philosophic stores, superior light; / And in whose breast, enthusiastic, burns / Virtue, the sons of ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1748, 1777

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1748, 1754

"The Mind still pushing onwards and increasing its Stock of Ideas, ascends from those to an higher Species of Objects, viz. the Order and Mutual Relations of Minds to each other, their reciprocal Affections, Characters, Actions, and various Aspects."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"Nature has therefore endued us with a MIDDLE FACULTY, wonderfully adapted to our MIXED State, which holds partly of Sense and partly of Reason, being strongly allied to the former, and the common Receptacle in which all the Notices that come from that quarter are treasured up, and yet greatly su...

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1754

"Into this common Storehouse are likewise carried all those Moral Images or Forms which are derived from our Moral Faculties of Perception, and there they often undergo new Changes and Appearances, by being mixed and wrought up with the Images and Forms of Sensible or Natural Thing."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1753

"The nymph, whose passions nature had filled to the brim, could not hear such a rhapsody unmoved"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Thou look'st at me, as if thou fain would'st pry / Into my heart. 'Tis open as my speech."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Infernal fiends, if any fiends there are / More fierce than hate, ambition, and revenge, / Rise up and fill my bosom with your fires, / And policy remorseless!"

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Thy inspiration, Lord! / Hath fill'd his bosom with that sacred fire, / Which in the breasts of his forefathers burn'd."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"'Twas I! alas! 'twas I / That fill'd her breast with fury"

— Home, John (1722-1808)