Date: 1774

"Were it necessary to produce instances of a fruitful imagination unproductive of true genius, we might find enough among those pretenders to poetry, who can, through many lines, run from one shining image to another, and finish many harmonious periods, without any sentiment or design; or among t...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"When a vegetable draws in moisture from the earth, nature, by the same action by which it draws it in, and at the same time, converts it to the nourishment of the plant: it at once circulates through its vessels, and is assimilated to its several parts. In like manner, genius arranges its ideas ...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"As a rich soil produces not only the largest quantity of grain, but also the greatest profusion of such weeds as tend to choak it; so a fertile imagination, along with just and useful ideas, produces many trifling, false, and improper thoughts, which, if they be not immediately examined by reaso...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: December 10, 1774; 1775

"The mind is but a barren soil; is a soil soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilised and enriched with foreign matter."

— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)

Date: 1774

"Hence Princes generally neglect nothing which may bring luxury into esteem: they recommend it by their example; they display every where pageantry and magnificence, and are the first to sow in the minds of their subjects those seeds of corruption."

— Marat, Jean-Paul (1743-1793)

Date: 1775

Young thought is "spread" by "kindly cares"

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

"Vital airs" alone will not impart "health and vigour" to the soul

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

The opening heart is warmed byt "kindly cares"

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

Women, "like garden-trees," seldom show fruit, "till time has robbed them of the more specious blossom"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1776-1789

"The ancient families of Rome had successively fallen beneath the tyranny of the Cæsars; and, whilst those princes were shackled by the forms of a commonwealth, and disappointed by the repeated failure of their posterity, it was impossible that any idea of hereditary succession should have ...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)