Date: June, 1756
"I sent back memory, in heedful guise, / To search the records of preceding years; / Home, like the raven to the ark, she flies, / Croaking bad tidings to my trembling ears."
preview | full record— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)
Date: 1759
"To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1760, 1761
"Reason, collected in herself, disdains / The slavish yoke of arbitrary chains"
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1760-7
"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
"When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,--or, in other words, when his Hobby-Horse grows head-strong,--farewell cool reason and fair discretion!"
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
"But here the mind has all the evidence and facts within herself;--is conscious of the web she has wove;--knows its texture and fineness, and the exact share which every passion has had in working upon the several designs which virtue or vice has plann'd before her."
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
"Shall not conscience rise up and sting him on such occasions?"
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
"The very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Anima, or even the Animus, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tad-pole, all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle,--or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, s...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1760-7
"Now don't let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter, take advantage of any one spot of rising-ground to get astride of your imagination, if you can any ways help it; or if he is so nimble as to slip on,--let me beg of you, like an unback'd filly, to frisk it, to squirt it, to jump it, to rear it,...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1762-3
"Whatever unto them is brought / Is carried on the wings of thought / Before his throne, where, in full state, / He on their merits holds debate, / Examines, cross-examines, weighs / Their right to censure or to praise."
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)