Date: Saturday, September 15, 1750
"The first effect of this meditation is, that it furnishes a new employment for the mind, and engages the passions on remoter objects; as kings have sometimes freed themselves from a subject too haughty to be governed and too powerful to be crushed, by posting him in a distant province, till his ...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1751, 1791
"The passions are a num'rous crowd, / Imperious, positive, and loud: / Curb these licentious sons of strife; / Hence chiefly rise the storms of life: / If they grow mutinous, and rave, / They are thy masters, thou their slave."
preview | full record— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)
Date: 1759
"He shewed, with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher; that when fancy, the parent of passion, usurps the dominion of the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful go...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1761
"Does Conscience, that just Judge, confirm my sentence? / There I am clear."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)
Date: 1762-3
"(Good Gravity! forbear thy spleen, / When I say wit, I wisdom mean) / Where, (such the practice of the court, / Which legal precedents support) / Not one idea is allow'd / To pass unquestion'd in the crowd, / But ere it can obtain the grace / Of holding in the brain a place, / Before the chief i...
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: January, 1764; 1774
Genius "Turns rebel to dame reason's throne / And holds no judgment like his own."
preview | full record— Lloyd, Robert (bap. 1733, d. 1764)
Date: 1773
"Hail to pleasure's frolic train; / Hail to fancy's golden reign; / Festive mirth, and laughter wild, / Free and sportful as the child; / Hope with eager sparkling eyes, / And easy faith, and fond surprise: / Let these, in fairy colours drest, / Forever share my careless breast; / Then, tho' wise...
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1776
"Oh! jealousy, / Thou tyrant of the mind."
preview | full record— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)
Date: 1777
"His heart, for a moment, revolted at the idea of seduction; but he soon silenced the unwelcome monitor."
preview | full record— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)
Date: 1788
"When sovereign Reason from her throne is hurl'd, / And with her all the subject senses whirl'd, / From sweet HUMANITY, the nurse of grief, / Even thy deep woes, O Phrenzy! find relief."
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)