Date: August 27, 1751

"When a number of distinct images are collected by these erratick and hasty surveys, the fancy is busied in arranging them; and combines them into pleasing pictures with more resemblance to the realities of life as experience advances, and new observations rectify the former."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: August 27, 1751

"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1752

"What a Happiness have you painted to my Imagination!"

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1754

A mind may be cast in a different mould

— Clark [née Lewis], Esther (bap. 1716, d. 1794)

Date: 1754

"The scene of the mind, like a moving picture, must be governed with attention, that it may bring into our view the images we want, and as we want them. Otherwise ideas that are foreign to our actual train of thinking will frequently rush into our thoughts, and become objects of them whether we w...

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1754

"When they have really such ideas in their minds, they must remember too that figures and comparisons are varnish still. It must not be used to alter the intellectual picture, it must only serve to give a greater lustre, and to make it better seen."

— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Date: 1755

"But what Imagination can paint the Extravagance of Joy I felt on this happy Acquisition!"

— Charke [née Cibber; other married name Sacheverell], Charlotte [alias Mr Brown] (1713-1760)

Date: 1761

"No, thou art all that's elegant and fair, / And perfect upon earth; and Caius happy / Beyond whatever gratitude express'd, / Or fancy drew, when glowing raptures catch / The poet's breast, and set the soul on fire."

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

Date: 1762

"[M]ake this dear-bought soul of mine / A monument of grace Divine"

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1763

"My tears streamed afresh when I beheld him, when I remembered the sweet hours we had passed together, the gay scenes which hope had painted to our hearts; I wept over the friend I had so loved, I pressed his cold hand to my lips."

— Brooke [née Moore], Frances (bap. 1724, d. 1789)