Date: 1766-1769, 1956
"This family! this landlord, let me say, or this landlady, as the mind and the soul are both she. I shall confuse myself with metaphor. Let me then have done with it."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1767
"He is now reduced to the greatest want and beggary, he is become a meer tabula rasa, a sheet of blank paper, a page of perfect inanity."
preview | full record— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)
Date: 1767
His existence is now at last in no danger of comminution, but then his powers are absolutely gone and quite evaporated. In a word, he is as dry and empty as a beer barrel after it has been some time set a-broach to a drunken mob at a general election."
preview | full record— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)
Date: 1767
"Thus it appears to be in every respect a proper counterbalance to the RAMBLING and VOLATILE power of IMAGINATION. The one, perpetually attempting to soar, is apt to deviate into the mazes of error; while the other arrests the wanderer in its vagrant course, and compels it to follow the path of n...
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1767
"The order of things is thereby reversed; reason is dethroned, and sense usurps the place of judgment."
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1767
"In order therefore to relish and to judge of the production of Genius and to Art, there must be an internal perceptive power, exquisitely sensible to all the impressions which such productions are capable of making on a susceptible mind."
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1767
"In this department, reason reassumes the reins, points out and prescribes the flight of fancy, assigns the office, and determines the authority of taste, which, as we have already observed, must here be contented to act a secondary part."
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1767
"The period depends sometimes upon a fortunate accident encouraging its exertion, sometimes upon a variety of concurring causes stimulating its ardor, and sometimes upon that natural effervescence of mind (if we may thus express it) by which it bursts forth with irresistible energy, at different ...
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1767
"Imagination therefore being that faculty which lays the foundation of all our knowledge, by collecting and treasuring up in the repository of the memory those materials on which Judgment is afterwards to work, and being peculiarly adapted to the gay, delightful, vacant season of childhood and yo...
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)
Date: 1767
"A Painter therefore of true Genius, having his fancy strongly impressed and wholly occupied by the most lively conceptions of the objects of which he intends to express the resemblance, has immediate recourse to his pencil, and attempts, by the dexterous use of colours, to sketch out those perfe...
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)