Date: 1598

"His heart like an agate with your print impressed, / Proud with his form, in his eye pride expressed."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1603

"And let me wring your heart; for so I shall / If it be made of penetrable stuff, / If damnèd custom have not brassed it so / That it is proof and bulwark against sense."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: February 22, 1723

"Nature on their unpolish'd marble prints / Much tenderer sentiments, than some can boast / Who call them barbarous."

— Fenton, Elijah (1683-1730)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Men's minds are temper'd, like their swords, for war."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: 1761

"Soon as the guilty passion is allay'd, / The green and morbid colour of our souls / Is chang'd to virgin white; a gentle breeze / Of pity springs within us."

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

Date: 1764

"Bold was the man, and fenc'd in ev'ry part /With oak, and ten-fold brass about the heart, / To build a play who tortur'd first his brain, / And then dar'd launch it on this stormy main."

— Murphy, Arthur (1727-1805)

Date: 1796

"A plague on stoicks! / I cannot hoop my heart about with iron, / Like an old beer-butt"

— Colman, George, the younger (1762-1836)

Date: 1799

"Ignorance has set her stamp upon him--his mind seared to every virtuous impression--his heart flint, and his temper moved by the slightest breath"

— West, Matthew (d. 1814); Kotzebue (1761-1819)

Date: 1800

"The inner world, his microcosmus, is / The deep shaft, out of which they spring eternally."

— Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805)