Date: 1771, 1776

"Adieu, ye lays, that fancy's flowers adorn, / The soft amusement of the vacant mind!"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1771

"I am inclined to think, no mind was ever wholly exempt from envy; which, perhaps, may have been implanted, as an instinct essential to our nature"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1771

"Roused from the sleep of death, a countless crowd / ("Whose hearts like trees before the wind are bow'd ... ) / Press to the hallow'd courts, with eager strife, / Catch the convincing word, and hear for life"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1772

One may weed out unmanly prejudice from the hearts of his countrymen

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

Date: 1773, 1810

"Hail, mild Philosophy! the province thine, / To chase the spectres of the dark Divine! / Not to fix errour, but with reason's art, / To root the stiff old-woman from the heart."

— Stockdale, Percival (1736-1811)

Date: 1773, 1894-1895

"For what the Bark is to the growing Tree, / To human Mind, that, Patience seems to be; / They hold the Principles of Growth together, / And blunt the Force of Accident, and Weather."

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

Date: 1773, 1894-1895

"Patience defends us from all outward Hap; / Of inward Life Thanksgiving is the Sap."

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

Date: 1774

"Were it necessary to produce instances of a fruitful imagination unproductive of true genius, we might find enough among those pretenders to poetry, who can, through many lines, run from one shining image to another, and finish many harmonious periods, without any sentiment or design; or among t...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"When a vegetable draws in moisture from the earth, nature, by the same action by which it draws it in, and at the same time, converts it to the nourishment of the plant: it at once circulates through its vessels, and is assimilated to its several parts. In like manner, genius arranges its ideas ...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"As a rich soil produces not only the largest quantity of grain, but also the greatest profusion of such weeds as tend to choak it; so a fertile imagination, along with just and useful ideas, produces many trifling, false, and improper thoughts, which, if they be not immediately examined by reaso...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)