Date: 1774

"I will show your letter to Duval, by way of justification for not answering his challenge; and I think he must allow the validity of it; for a frozen brain is as unfit to answer a challenge in poetry, as a blunt sword is for a single combat."

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1774

"His virtues and his vices, his reason and his passions, did not blend themselves by a gradation of tints, but formed a shining and sudden contrast. Here the darkest, there the most splendid colors; and both rendered more shining from their proximity."

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1774

"Vanity is unquestionably the ruling passion in women; and it is much flattered by the attentions of a man who is generally esteemed by men; when his merit has received the stamp of their approbation, women make it current, that is to say, put him in fashion."

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1774

"I will study Demosthenes and Cicero, not to discover an old Athenian or Roman custom, nor to puzzle myself with the value of talents, mines, drachms, and sesterces, like the learned blockheads in us; but to observe their choice of words, their harmony of diction, their method, their distribution...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1777

"Pale-eyed Affright, his heart of silver hue, / In vain essayed her bosom to acale."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: 1778

" In thee, by art, the demon stands confest, / But nature on thy soul has stamped the god."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: 1778

"To melancholy thoughts awakes the soul, / And lulls the mind to contemplation's dream"

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: 1778

"As to my Fanny and myself, our souls had been created, like sympathetic steel and magnet, to leap together at first sight!"

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: 1780

"Behold the frantick passion how it burns, / Like a wild beast breaks every tie, / Laughs at the Priest; the Legislator spurns, / And gives both heaven and earth the lye!"

— Stevenson, John Hall (1717-1785)

Date: w. 1769, 1784

Religion "'Tis fancy all, distempers of the mind / As Education taught us, we're inclined."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)