Date: 1684

"My grateful Thoughts so throng to get abroad, / They over-run each other in the crowd: / To you with hasty flight they take their way, / And hardly for the dress of words will stay."

— Oldham, John (1653-1683)

Date: 1687, 1691

"And though it may seem difficult to be a Saint, in passing ones days in a Prophane Place, yet think not my Piety grows luke-warm, or my Friendship diminished; seeing I have made a Mosque of my Heart, where Friends are ever present."

— Marana, Giovanni Paolo (1642-1693); Anonymous [William Bradshaw (fl. 1700) or Robert Midgley (1655?-1723)?]

Date: 1696

"Pitty would not now at least /Have been a stranger to her Breast"

— Oldmixon, John (1672/3-1742)

Date: 1698

"Nay, such Gentlemen would be much offended their Houses should not be clean Swept, and Garnish'd; yet, they are not, in the least, concern'd, that Cobwebs should hang in the Windows of their Intellect, and Dusty Ignorance dim and blear the Sight of the Noble Inhabitant."

— Sergeant, John (1622-1707)

Date: 1704

"For, it is the opinion of choice virtuosi, that the brain is only a crowd of little animals, but with teeth and claws extremely sharp, and therefore cling together in the contexture we behold, like the picture of Hobbes's Leviathan, or like bees in perpendicular swarm upon a tr...

— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)

Date: 1716

"Led on by Reason, that blind Guide o'th'Mind. / Thro Labyrinths of Thought, and envious Ways, / It will conduct you to the fatal Place, / And leave you there."

— Anonymous

Date: 1716

"As by Rebellion Subjects oft become / Lords of their Monarch, and pronounce his Doom: / So Reason, to your wicked Nature join'd, / Rebels 'gainst Faith, whose Slave it was design'd."

— Anonymous

Date: September 10, 1726

"Yet we must not suppose that they are continually in their Retirement; they would become useless if they were so. But on the contrary, great Numbers of them are always going to and fro; and if one of them chances to go by the Cell or Lodge of another which has the least real or imaginary conform...

— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)

Date: September 10, 1726

"Now, according to my supposition, there being no active intelligent Being, who, by his Presence and Superintendency, governs and directs the Course of those vagabond Images, every thing in the Brain resembles the fortuitous concourse of Atoms."

— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)

Date: September 10, 1726

"Two Images meet, and unite to each other; these two meeting with a third, it unites to them in the same manner: and this Meeting and Union continuing for some time, at last occasions a most monstrous Aggregation, very like the Chaos of the Poet, where 'Frigida cum calidis pugnant, humentia sicci...

— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)