Date: 1733-1735

"Still be his Image on your Mind imprest; / Be that the Mirror which you most admire, / Mortality itself can rise no higher."

— Bowden, Samuel (fl. 1733-1761)

Date: 1734 [1735?]

"Customs or Int'rests govern all Mankind, / Some Biass cleaves to the unguarded Mind; / Thro' this, as in a false or flatt'ring Glass / Things seem to change their Natures as they pass."

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

Date: 1734

"Or Fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies, / Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Not so the moral species, nor the powers / Of genius and design; the ambitious mind / There sees herself: by these congenial forms / Touch'd and awaken'd, with intenser act / She bends each nerve, and meditates well-pleas'd / Her features in the mirror."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1785

"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1788

There are those "whom the traffic of their race / Has robb'd of every human grace; / Whose harden'd souls no more retain / Impressions Nature stamp'd in vain; / All that distinguishes their kind, / For ever blotted from their mind; / As streams, that once the landscape gave / Reflected o...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1790

"And o'er Imagination's gloomy glass, / Despair's mute sons like Banquo's visions pass"

— Merry, Robert (1755-1798)

Date: 1796

"No drug, nor juice of all the acid tribe, / Can move the Tints, which Glassy Pores imbibe; / So no mean prejudice, no bribes, nor art, / Efface th' Impressions of an Upright Heart."

— Bishop, Samuel (1731-1795)