Date: 1726

"Wide-stretching from these shores, / A people savage from remotest time, / A huge neglected empire, one vast mind, / By Heaven inspired, from gothic darkness call'd."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1729

"Oh, let not the soft, penetrating plague / Creep on the freeborn mind! and working there, / With the sharp tooth of many a new-form'd want, / Endless, and idle all, eat out the heart / Of liberty; the high conception blast; / The noble sentiment, the impatient scorn / Of base subjection, and the...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1729

"Induced at last, by scarce perceived degrees, / Sapping the very frame of government, / And life, a total dissolution comes; / Sloth, ignorance, dejection, flattery, fear."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1729

Then the good easy man, whom reason rules; / Rouz'd by bold insult, and injurious rage, / With sharp, and sudden check, th' astonish'd sons / Of violence confounds; firm as his cause, / His bolder heart; in awful justice clad; / His eyes effulging a peculiar fire: / And, as he charges thro' the p...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"See there the ruins of the noble mind, / When from calm reason passion tears the sway."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1735-6

"Yielded reason speaks the soul a slave"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1735-6

Giddy Reason may totter on her throne

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1735-6

"Of one who, should the unkingly thirst of gold, / Or tyrant passions, or ambition, prompt, / Calls locust-armies o'er the blasted land:"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)