Date: 1748

"Cæsar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great are continually in his mouth; and as he reads a good deal without any judgment to digest it, his ideas are confused, and his harrangues as unintelligible as infinite."

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1747-8

Imaginations may be "un-reined"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1747-8

Passion may blind the judgment and help on meditated delusion

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1748

"I now began to look upon myself as a gentleman in reality; learned to dance of a Frenchman whom I had cured of a fashionable distemper; frequented plays during the holidays; became the oracle of an ale-house, where every dispute was referred to my decision; and at length contracted an acquaintan...

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1748

"I had made a conquest of her heart, and concluded myself the happiest man alive"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1747-8

"And is it not philosophy carried to the highest pitch, for a man to conquer such tumults of soul as I am sometimes agitated by, and, in the very height of the storm, to be able to quaver out an horse-laugh?"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1747-8

Lovelace has not made "assiduity and obsequiousness, and a conquest of his unruly passions, any part of his study"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1747-8

Lovelace has found, "[A] first passion thoroughly subdued, made the conqueror of it a rover; the conqueress a tyrant"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1747-8

"There is no triumph in force! No conquest over the will! --No prevailing, by gentle degrees, over the gentle passions!"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1747-8

Clarissa gives an instance "of a passion conquered, when there were so many inducements to give way to it"

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)