Date: 1720

"Your Guilt will stretch your Conscience on the Rack, / You'll be arraign'd, and punish'd for the Fact."

— Pennecuik, Alexander (d. 1730)

Date: 1720

"Severity makes more Hypocrites than any Sort of Discipline; streight lacing the Body may make us good Shapes, but there's no streight lacing our Minds."

— Shadwell, Charles (fl. 1692-1720)

Date: 1720

"The extream Idle have no Goust to any Thing but sauntering, which more effectually wearies the Mind and Body than Exercise and Toil."

— Manley, Delarivier (c. 1670-1724)

Date: First performed February 17, 1720.

"O self-destroying Monster! that art blind, / Yet putt'st out Reason's Eyes, that still shou'd guide thee, / Then plungest down some Precipice unseen, / And art no more!--Hear me, all-gracious Heav'n!"

— Hughes, John (1678?-1720)

Date: First performed February 17, 1720.

"It wounds my Heart / To think thou follow'st but to share my Ruin."

— Hughes, John (1678?-1720)

Date: 1721, 1722

"Dissimulation, an art among us universally practised, and so necessary, is unknown here: they speak every thing, see every thing, and hear every thing: the heart, like the face, is visible."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1722

"No impious Itch of Empire fires our Mind, / Nor are our Hearts to those base Thoughts inclin'd."

— Hamilton, William, of Gilbertfield (c. 1665-1751)

Date: 1722

One's head and heart may be "on the rack" about something worrisome

— Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729)

Date: 1722

"I had now such a Load on my Mind that it kept me perpetually waking."

— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)

Date: 1722

"[T]he Truth is, he ought to have been trusted with every Thing; for no Man could deserve better of a Wife; but this was a thing I knew not how to open to him, and yet having no Body to disclose any Part of it to, the Burthen was too heavy for my Mind."

— Defoe, Daniel (1660?-1731)