Date: 1778

"I should have hoped that a man of his knowledge--and who has studied in the manner he [Dr. Blair] must have done--(being a professor of the Belles Lettres,) might have emancipated his mind from the shackles of system."

— Caulfield (fl. 1778)

Date: 1778

"But, as an author of great fame / (I can't just recollect his name) / Has somewhere said, who seeks to bind / By force, or fraud, a woman's mind, / With locks, and bolts, and bars, and chains, / But gets his labour for his pains."

— Moore, Sir John Henry (1756-1780)

Date: 1778

"Why, my sweet one, you are all power, all a goddess; and you hold my heart enslaved in the chains of immortal love."

— Robertson, James (fl.1768-1788)

Date: 1779

"Let me exhort ye then to open the locks of your hearts with the nail of repentance: burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts, mount the chimney of hope, take from hence the bar of good resolution, break through the stone wall of despair, and all the strong holds in the dark entry of the v...

— Anonymous

Date: November 9, 1779

"Thus, conscience freed from ev'ry clog, / Mahometans eat up the hog."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1779

"Banish'd--robb'd of my country, and my name; / Yet they have left a mind defies their vengeance-- / Which, though these limbs were lock'd in bolts of steel, / And darkness wrapt these precious founts of light, / Would rise superior to their bounded power, / And scorn alike their fetters, and the...

— Cowley [née Parkhouse], Hannah (1743-1809)

Date: 1779-1780, 1781

"The latter part of his life cannot be remembered but with pity and sadness. He languished some years under that depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1780

"Shall vanity enslave this freeborn mind, / And chains of sense my nobler passions bind?"

— Steele, Anne (1717-1778)

Date: 1780

"In vain my fetter'd thoughts attempt to fly / And weakly fluttering mean the distant sky!"

— Steele, Anne (1717-1778)

Date: 1780

"Generous Britain scorns to bind, / In servile chains, the freeborn mind."

— Pilon, Frederick (1750-1788)