Date: 1754

"Most rightly have ye judged, O ye Cry; for the turba, ever watchful for an opportunity to invest the human mind, no sooner discovered an unguarded moment, than, like a nest of hornets arm'd with all their stings, they enter'd my once peaceful bosom."

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1754

"Those inimitably beautiful chorus's to Shakespear's Harry the fifth, where he desires his audience to play with their fancies, and to suffer him to bear them on the lofty wings of his own sublime imagination, over the expanded ocean to different countries and distant climates, we should have tho...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768) and Jane Collier (bap. 1715, d. 1755)

Date: 1756, 1766

"Whether the learned Dr. Edmund Law, and the great Dr. Sherlock bishop of London, be right, in asserting, the human soul sleeps like a bat or a swallow, in some cavern for a period, till the last trumpet awakens the hero of Voltaire and Henault, I mean Lewis XIV."

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1759

"[S]he had no Food from outward Objects, to employ her animal Spirits, and they therefore prey'd at home; and oppressed her own Mind."

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1759

The passions may "rebel against their proper Guide, and forcibly snatch the Reins out of the Hands of that Governor appointed to restrain and keep them within their own prescribed Bounds"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1759

"To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1759

"This [her own Mind] being haunted with Ghosts, dejected with an unaccountable Melancholy, and afflicted with a Variety of Distempers, tho' we are at a Loss to discover what Appellation to give them, is very often the Result of nothing more than a strong Imagination unimployed, which could be all...

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"When a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,--or, in other words, when his Hobby-Horse grows head-strong,--farewell cool reason and fair discretion!"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But here the mind has all the evidence and facts within herself;--is conscious of the web she has wove;--knows its texture and fineness, and the exact share which every passion has had in working upon the several designs which virtue or vice has plann'd before her."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)