Date: 1723

"Thou see'st from whence her Colours Fancy takes, / Of what Materials she her Pencil makes / By which she paints her Scenes with such Applause, / And in the Brain ten thousand Landskips draws."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1723

"Thou know'st the downy Chains that softly bind / Our slumb'ring Sense, when waiting Objects find / No Avenue left open to the Mind."

— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)

Date: 1724

"That fiery thought / Glows in my breast; and as I weigh my wrongs, / I swell like Ætna, when her sulph'rous rage / Bursts o'er the earth, and rolls in floods of fire."

— Savage, Richard (1697/8-1743)

Date: 1724

"When all at once / A thousand anxious Thoughts that slept by Day, / Swarm'd in my Brain, 'till it resembled Hell, / Hot, dark and hot: my sick Imagination, / Assisted by the Shades of Night, would give / A gloomy turn to each Idea there."

— Jeffreys, George (1678-1755)

Date: 1724, 1725

"[Love] that Tyrant Passion lords it o'er the Mind, fills every Faculty, and leaves no room for any other Thought--drives Consideration far away--overturns Reflection-- and permits no Image but itself to dwell in Fancy's Region"

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

Date: 1725

"Rais'd on the noble prospect of the mind, / From that proud eminence they view mankind"

— Pitt, Christopher (1699-1748)

Date: 1726

"I know in descriptions of this nature the scenes are generally supposed to grow out of the author's imagination, and if they are not charming in all their parts, the reader never imputes it to the want of sun or soil, but to the barrenness of invention"

— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)

Date: 1734 [1735?]

"Deaf to Advice, or taking Wrong for Right, / They boldly blunder on in Reason's Spite; / And under clearer Light's obscure Pretence / Live the Antipodes of common Sense."

— Paget, Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget (1689-1742)

Date: 1736, 1737, 1759, 1744, 1771, 1773

"Female youth, left to weak woman's care" are "Strangers to reason and reflection made, / Left to their passions, and by them betrayed; / Untaught the noble end of glorious truth, / Bred to deceive even from earliest youth; / Unused to books, nor virtue taught to prize; / Whose mind, a savage was...

— Ingram, Anne [née Howard; other married name Douglas], Viscountess Irwin (c. 1696-1764)

Date: 1737, 1743

"It is not so much the being exempt from Faults, as the having overcome them, that is an Advantage to us; it being with the Follies of the Mind as with the Weeds of a Field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place of their Birth, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung the...

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)