Date: 1774

"In this manner, as a master-builder has his materials prepared by inferiour workmen, or as a history painter is provided with his colours by the labour of others, so the faculty of invention often receives the entire ideas which it exhibits, from the inferiour faculties, and employs itself only...

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Date: 1774

"I often paint you in my imagination, in your present lontananza, and, while I view you in the light of ancient and modern learning, useful and ornamental knowledge, I am charmed with the prospect; but when I view you in another light, and represent you awkward, ungraceful, ill-bred, with vulgar ...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1775

"See, in their course, each transitory thought / Fixed by his touch a lasting essence take; / Each dream, in fancy's airy colouring wrought, / To local symmetry and life awake!"

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

"[B]e assured I throw the original from my heart as easily!"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1776-1789

"The dissolute tyranny of Commodus, the civil wars occasioned by his death, and the new maxims of policy introduced by the house of Severus, had all contributed to increase the dangerous power of the army, and to obliterate the faint image of laws and liberty that was still impressed on the minds...

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1776

"It is his purpose in this Work, on the one hand, to exhibit, he does not say, a correct map, but a tolerable sketch of the human mind; and aided by the lights which the poet and the orator so amply furnish, to disclose its secret movements, tracing its principal channels of perception and action...

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1776

"It is sufficient that such things be hinted to the understanding, so that the meaning may be apprehended, it is by no means fit that they be painted in the liveliest colours to the fancy."

— Campbell, George (1719-1796)

Date: 1777

"Though I meant a description, I have scrawled through most of my paper without beginning one. I have made but some slight sketches of his mind; of his person I have said nothing, which, from a woman to a woman, should have been mentioned the soonest."

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1777

"Images of vengeance and destruction paint themselves to my mind, when I think of his discovering that weakness which I cannot hide from myself."

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)

Date: 1777

"If you marry a man of a certain sort, such as the romance of young minds generally paints for a husband, you will deride the supposition of any possible decrease in the ardour of your affections."

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)