Date: 1752

"Well! does that make you wise, / Or open on your Follies, Reason's Eyes!"

— Duncombe, John (1729-1786) [pseud.]

Date: 1752

"Caution'd in vain--Oh! ever Passion's Slave! / You tempt your Fate, and the same Dangers brave."

— Duncombe, John (1729-1786) [pseud.]

Date: 1752

A puppet may be "compell'd by secret Springs" just as an engine "moves with Motions not its own"

— Duncombe, John (1729-1786) [pseud.]

Date: 1753

"Trembling, he sees the threatning tempest roll, / And ev'ry rising billow lifts his soul:"

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)

Date: 1753

"So, gold, pernicious in its nature, may, / By souls, like yours, be bent a nobler way:/ Thus, as the needle, by magnetic force, / Once touch'd, still, to the magnet guides its course. / Trembling, while wand'ring thence, and finds no rest, / 'Till clasp'd, and fastened, to its darling breast."

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)

Date: 1753

"When Flora sweeps the Table with a Vole, / What Breast so steel'd as Grief can not invade, / To see the Havock on her Beautys made!"

— Cooke, Thomas (1703-1756)

Date: 1755

"Or, the Power and Sway which the Soul exercises over them! Ten thousand Reins put into her Hands; yet she manages all, conducts all, without the least Perplexity or the least Irregularity: rather, with a Promptitude, a Consistency, and a Speed, that nothing else can equal!"

— Hervey, James (1714-1758)

Date: 1767

"He is now reduced to the greatest want and beggary, he is become a meer tabula rasa, a sheet of blank paper, a page of perfect inanity."

— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)

Date: 1767

His existence is now at last in no danger of comminution, but then his powers are absolutely gone and quite evaporated. In a word, he is as dry and empty as a beer barrel after it has been some time set a-broach to a drunken mob at a general election."

— Campbell, Archibald (bap. 1724, d. 1780)

Date: 1768

"The deep Philsopher who turns mankind / Quite inside outwards, and dissects the mind, / Wou'd look but whimsical and strangely out, / To grudge some Quack his treatise on the gout."

— Wilkie, William (1721-1772)