Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"These flattering scenes / To this neglected labour court my song; / Yet not unconscious what a doubtful task / To paint the finest features of the mind, / And to most subtile and mysterious things / Give colour, strength, and motion."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: June 1751, 1752
"Thou [Eagle] type of wit and sense confin'd, / Cramp'd by the oppressors of the mind, / Who study downward on the ground."
preview | full record— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)
Date: 1762-3
"With these grave fops, whose system seems / To give up certainty for dreams / The eye of man is understood / As for no other purpose good / Than as a door, through which, of course, / Their passage crowding objects force; / A downright usher, to admit / New-comers to the court of Wit."
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1763, 1770
"Yes, doubtless, steel'd--but still he show'd a heart, / As soft, as Cleopatra's softest part."
preview | full record— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)
Date: 1763
"He will by this means too escape the pernicious snares of flattery, the servile court of interested inferiors, and all the various mischiefs which poison the minds of young men bred up as heirs to great estates and titles."
preview | full record— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)
Date: 1765, 1770
"Passions, and snow balls each by motion swell, / And Kitty finds her little heart rebel; / Full of desires she sighs for this, and that, / Her heart for ev'ry man goes pit-a-pat."
preview | full record— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)
Date: 1765, 1770
"We've some of hotter, some of colder make, / And some whose drowsy passions never wake."
preview | full record— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)
Date: 1765, 1770
"This is the man who first impeach'd his friend, / And on his ruin rose, yet could not lend / One cobweb virtue from his scurvy soul, / Which sins by study, and without controul."
preview | full record— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)
Date: 1777, 1810
"And oft the bard's elastic mind / To lighter images inclined; / In concord with Anacreon's measure, / Courts the jovial gods of pleasure."
preview | full record— Stockdale, Percival (1736-1811)