Date: 1749
"These were Esteem and Pity; for sure the most outragiously rigid among her Sex will excuse her pitying a Man, whom she saw miserable on her own Account; nor can they blame her for esteeming one who visibly from the most honourable Motives, endeavoured to smother a Flame in his own Bosom, which, ...
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1751
"Tears gushing again, my heart fluttering as a bird against its wires; drying my eyes again and again to no purpose."
preview | full record— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)
Date: 1751
"[H]is heart was shod with a metal much harder than iron, which he was afraid nothing but hell-fire would be able to melt."
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1756, 1766
"Whether the learned Dr. Edmund Law, and the great Dr. Sherlock bishop of London, be right, in asserting, the human soul sleeps like a bat or a swallow, in some cavern for a period, till the last trumpet awakens the hero of Voltaire and Henault, I mean Lewis XIV."
preview | full record— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)
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: 1760-7
"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)