Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757
"Men's minds are temper'd, like their swords, for war."
preview | full record— Home, John (1722-1808)
Date: 1761
"Soon as the guilty passion is allay'd, / The green and morbid colour of our souls / Is chang'd to virgin white; a gentle breeze / Of pity springs within us."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)
Date: 1761
"Did not your master Plato maintain, that all the art of man, that all philosophy could not extract from the human mind what nature had not implanted there; as all the operations in chemistry are incapable of extracting from any mixture more gold than is already contained in it?"
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)
Date: 1764
"Bold was the man, and fenc'd in ev'ry part /With oak, and ten-fold brass about the heart, / To build a play who tortur'd first his brain, / And then dar'd launch it on this stormy main."
preview | full record— Murphy, Arthur (1727-1805)
Date: 1765
"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"
preview | full record— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)
Date: 1768
"Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions, tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?"
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: December 10, 1774; 1775
"He will pick up from dunghills what by a nice chymistry, passing through his own mind, shall be converted into pure gold; and, under the rudeness of Gothic essays, he will find original, rational, and even sublime inventions."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: w. 1755, 1777
"She [Nature] employs it [spiritual substance] as a kind of paste or clay; modifies it into a variety of forms and existences; dissolves after a time each modification, and from its substance erects a new form."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1780
"My Potter stamp on me thy clay, Thy only stamp of love!"
preview | full record— Wesley, John (1703-1791)
Date: 1782
The Muse, like Cato, "Well [...] supplies her want of softer art / By all the sterling treasures of the heart."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)