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 ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1745

"Then tell me, is your soul intire? / Does wisdom calmly hold her throne? / Then can you question each desire, / Bid this remain, and that begone?"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1772

"With that strong master of our frame, / The inexorable judge within / What can be done?"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1814

"No single passion, and no ruling thought / That leaves the rest, as once, unseen, unsought, / But the wild prospect when the Soul reviews, / All rushing through their thousand avenues"

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

Date: 1816

"He would not yield dominion of his mind / To Spirits against whom his own rebelled."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

Date: 1816

"[T]o conceal, / With a proud caution, love, or hate, or aught,-- / Passion or feeling, purpose, grief, or zeal,-- / Which is the tyrant Spirit of our thought, / Is a stern task of soul."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

Date: 1746

"With inward view, / Thence on the ideal kingdom swift she turns / Her eye; and instant, at her powerful glance, / The obedient phantoms vanish or appear; / Compound, divide, and into order shift, / Each to his rank, from plain perception up / To the fair forms of Fancy's fleeting train."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1757

"Now this great Ambition, which in other Times or Nations hath wrought such wonderful Effects, is no longer to be found among us. It is the Pride of Equipage, the Pride of Title, the Pride of Fortune, or the Pride of Dress, that have assumed the Empire over our Souls, and levelled Ambition with t...

— Brown, John (1715-1766)