Date: 1752, 1791

"Life's records rise on ev'ry side, / And Conscience spreads those volumes wide; / Which faithful registers were brought / By pale-ey'd Fear and busy Thought. / Those faults which artful men conceal, / Stand here engrav'd with pen of steel, / By Conscience, that impartial scribe!"

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1752

"'But you understand Human Nature to the Bottom,' answered Amelia;' and your Mind is a Treasury of all ancient and modern Learning.'"

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1752

"I need not sign this Letter, otherwise than with that Impression of my Heart which I hope it bears"

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: February 4, 1752

"My parents, though otherwise not great philosophers, knew the force of early education, and took care that the blank of my understanding should be filled with impressions of the value of money."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1753

Locke's "guiding Hand th'ideal Blank explores, / And opens wide the Senses' various Doors, / Thro' which the thronging Thoughts their Passage find, / In social Tribes, and stock the peopled Mind."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1753

One may "contemplate the catastrophe of such a wicked life, that the moral might be the more deeply engraved on his remembrance"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: 1753

"I teach true pleasures false ones to controul, / And warm the yielding heart, to stamp the mind"

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)

Date: 1753

"These divine foundations can never be shaken; all the good that is imprinted upon this rasa tabula can never be effaced; this holy favour with which a new vessel is imbued, will last a long time."

— Du Bosc, Jacques (d. 1660)

Date: June 1753

"My hand, the secretary of my mind, / Leaves thee these lines upon the poplar's rind."

— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)

Date: w. April 25, 1737; 1753

"Gone, tho' she is, she left her soul behind, / In four dear transcripts of her copy'd mind."

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)