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."
preview | full record— 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...
preview | full record— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)
Date: 1759
"His mighty mind travelled round the intellectual world; and, with a more than eagle's eye, saw, and has pointed out blank spaces, or dark spots in it, on which the human mind never shone."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1759
"Their [pedants'] constant overstraining of the Mind / Distorts the Brain, as Horses break their Wind / Or rude Confusions of the Things they read / Get up, like noxious Vapours, in the Head, / Until they have their constant Wanes and Fulls, / And Changes in the Insides of their Skulls."
preview | full record— Butler, Samuel (1613-1680)
Date: 1760?
The Grace teaches "When to check the sportive Vein; / When to Fancy give the Rein."
preview | full record— Langhorne, John (1735-1779)
Date: 1760
"O happy stroke, that bursts the bonds of clay, / Darts through the rending gloom the blaze of day, / And wings the soul with boundless flight to soar, / Where dangers threat, and fears alarm no more."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1760, 1776
"Fond he surveys thy mild maternal face, / His bashful eye still kindling as he views, / And, while thy lenient arm supports his pace, / With beating heart the upland path pursues: / The path that leads, where, hung sublime, / And seen afar, youth's gallant trophies, bright / In Fancy's rainbow r...
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1760, 1761
"Reason, collected in herself, disdains / The slavish yoke of arbitrary chains"
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
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...
preview | full record— 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!"
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)