Date: 1739

"At such a Time, it was, it was too much! / To pluck the soaring Pinion of my Soul, / While Eagle-ey'd she held her Flight to Heav'n, / O'er Pain and Death triumphant!"

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: 1752

"Remorse the Raven of a guilty Mind, / Is ever croaking horrid in my Ear; / Often I rouse to banish it away, / But the Tormentor still returns again, / And like PROMETHES' Vulture, ever gnaws."

— Gentleman, Francis (1728-1784)

Date: 1753

"The Moral of this Fable is, that Humanity is the Characteristick of Man; and that a cruel Soul in a human Body, is only a Wolf in Disguise."

— Boyse, Samuel (1708-1749)

Date: 1755

The "busy Statesman's mind" may grow putrid on the throne of power so that "Fresh vices spring up ev'ry hour; / As in dead corses serpents breed, / And loathsome, on corruption feed"

— Derrick, Samuel (1724-1769)

Date: 1756, 1766

"Whether the learned Dr. Edmund Law, and the great Dr. Sherlock bishop of London, be right, in asserting, the human soul sleeps like a bat or a swallow, in some cavern for a period, till the last trumpet awakens the hero of Voltaire and Henault, I mean Lewis XIV."

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1757

"By looking into physical causes our minds are opened and enlarged; and in this pursuit whether we take or whether we lose our game, the chace is certainly of service"

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1757

"[T]he judgment is for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling blocks in the way of the imagination, in dissipating the scenes of enchantment, and in tying us down to the disagreeable yoke of our reason"

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,--or, in other words, when his Hobby-Horse grows head-strong,--farewell cool reason and fair discretion!"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But here the mind has all the evidence and facts within herself;--is conscious of the web she has wove;--knows its texture and fineness, and the exact share which every passion has had in working upon the several designs which virtue or vice has plann'd before her."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)