Date: 1762-3
"This glorious system form'd for man / To practise when and how he can, / If the five senses in alliance / To Reason hurl a proud defiance, / And, though oft conquer'd, yet unbroken, / Endeavour to throw off that yoke / Which they a greater slavery hold / Than Jewish bondage was of old."
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1767
"Man in this world, Sir, may be compared to a hackney-coach upon a stand; continually subject to be drawn by his unruly appetites, on one foolish jaunt or another; but you will say, if his appetites are horses, which as it were drag him along, reason is the coachman to rule those horses--But, Sir...
preview | full record— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)
Date: 1773
Injur'd Reason may "her lost rights again / Resume, and of the passions take the rein"
preview | full record— Hitchcock, Robert (d. 1809)
Date: 1773
"But if thou com'st with frown austere / To nurse the brood of care and fear; / To bid our sweetest passions die, / And leave us in their room a sigh; / Or if thine aspect stern have power / To wither each poor transient flower, / That cheers the pilgrimage of woe, / And dry the springs whence ho...
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1767, 1778
"Envy in courts and cottages will dwell, / Nay climb to heaven itself, tho' born in hell: / In every living bosom lurks this pest, / But reigns unrival'd in the human breast; / On reason's throne usurps a thorny part, / And plants a thousand daggers in the heart."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1785
"I was surpriz'd, taken unawares, passion ran away with me like an unbroke horse: but I have got him under now; I can govern him with a twine of thread."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)
Date: 1789, 1800
"On his one ruling passion Sir Pope hugely labors, / That, like th'old Hebrew walking-switch, eats up its neighbours."
preview | full record— Burns, Robert (1759-1796)