Date: w. 1741

"While breath shall animate this frail machine, / My heart sincere, which never flatt'ry knew, / Shall consecrate its warmest wish to you."

— Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley [née Lady Mary Pierrepont] (1689-1762)

Date: 1743

"Though grey our heads, our thoughts and aims are green; / Like damaged clocks, whose hand and bell dissent; / Folly sings six, while Nature points at twelve."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1743

"That thought is the machine, / The grand machine that heaves us from the dust, / And rears us into men!"

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1744, 1753

"A Metaphor from Mechanism, I think, will very plainly illustrate my Thoughts on this Subject [of wit and judgment]: For let a Machine, of any kind, be joined together by an ingenious Artist, and I dare say, he will be best able to take it apart again: a Bungler, or an ignorant Person, perhaps, m...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Passion's fierce illapse / Rouzes the mind's whole fabric; with supplies / Of daily impulse keeps the elastic powers / Intensely poiz'd, and polishes anew / By that collision all the fine machine: / Else rust would rise, and foulness, by degrees / Incumbering, choak at last what heaven design'd ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1745

"There is, I grant, a triumph of the pulse, / A dance of spirits, a mere froth of joy, / Our thoughtless Agitation's idle child, / That mantles high, that sparkles, and expires, / Leaving the soul more vapid than before; / An animal ovation! such as holds / No commerce with our reason, but subsis...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1747-8

"She set even my heart into a palpitation--Thump, thump, thump, like a precipitated pendulum in a clock-case"

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

Date: 1747-8

"So now, Belford, as thou hast said, I am a machine at last, and no free agent."

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

Date: October 1750, 1752, 1791

"The less the body to the view, / The soul (like springs in closer durance pent) / Is all exertion, ever new, / Unceasing, unextinguish'd, and unspent"

— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)

Date: 1751

"If any Man hath found out a Kind of Motive which doth not affect himself, he hath made a deeper Investigation into the 'Springs, Weights, and Balances' of the human Heart, than I can pretend to."

— Brown, John (1715-1766)