Date: 1764

"From every speck which hangs upon the sight / Purge my mind's eye, nor let one cloud remain / To spread the shades of error o'er my brain),"

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1767, 1784

"So, when on some weighty truth / A beam of heav'nly light its lustre sheds, / To Reason's eye it looks supremely fair."

— Jago, Richard (1715-1781)

Date: 1768

"I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deferr'd."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"But I could wish, continued I, to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them to fashion my own by--and therefore am I come."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1773

"There, whilst the vault resounds my plaintive sigh, / In deathful echoes, shall Despondence bring / The saddest visions on the mind's wan eye, / That ever wav'd on Fancy's blackest wing"

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1774

"Many people lose a great deal of time by reading: for they read frivolous and idle books, such as the absurd romances of the two last centuries; where characters, that never existed, are insipidly displayed, and sentiments that were never felt, pompously described: the Oriental ravings and extra...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1777, 1793

"Hail, sacred solitude! These are thy works, / True source of good supreme! Thy blest effects /Already on my mind's delighted eye / Open beneficent"

— Dodd, William (1729-1777)

Date: 1779, 1781

"When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swoln with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impr...

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1779, 1781

"But the power of Cowley is not so much to move the affections, as to exercise the understanding."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)