Date: 1590?, 1623

"Read over Julia's heart, thy first, best love."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1590?, 1623

"Gentle girl, assist me, / And e'en in kind love I do conjure thee, / Who art the table wherein all my thoughts / Are visibly charactered and engraved / To lesson me, and tell me some good mean / How with my honour I may undertake / A journey to my loving Proteus."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1597

"I took him for the plainest harmless creature / That breathed upon the earth, a Christian, / Made him my book wherein my soul recorded / The history of all her secret thoughts."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1603

"Yea, from the table of my memory / I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, / That youth and observation copied there, / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmixed with baser matter."

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1611-12, 1623

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; / Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow; / Raze out the written troubles of the brain; / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?"

— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)

Date: 1665

Minds are "like smooth paper never writ upon, / When folded up, by some impression / Marks will remain it never had before, / And ne're return to former smoothness more."

— Howard, Sir Robert (1626-1698)

Date: 1671

"[C]onfirm it within ... With my hand seal & heart--"

— Howard, Edward (bap. 1624, d. 1712)

Date: August, 1674; 1675

"Your bounties too him have long since deeply engraven his crimes in my Soul"

— Crowne, John (bap. 1641, d. 1712)

Date: 1680

Faults may be blotted from the breast

— D'Urfey, Thomas (1653?-1723)

Date: 1681

"My Lady Millicent did me the honour to inform of some expressions of yours in favour of me; each syllable of which is engraven in my heart"

— D'Urfey, Thomas (1653?-1723)