Date: 1704
"Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet, if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern brains), the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb; the duration of which, like that of other spiders’ webs, may be imputed to their be...
preview | full record— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)
Date: 1725-6
"'Tis hard, he cries, to bring to sudden sight / Ideas that have wing'd their distant flight."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), Broome, W. and Fenton, E.
Date: 1727
"Some, with a dry and barren Brain, / Poor Rogues! like costive Lap-Dogs strain; / While others with a Flux of Wit, / The Reader and their Friends besh**t."
preview | full record— Somervile, William (1675-1742)
Date: 1729
"Among the helluones librorum, the Cormorants of Books, there are wretched Reasoners, that have canine Appetites, and no Digestion."
preview | full record— Mandeville, Bernard (bap. 1670, d. 1733)
Date: 1741
"For Thou who, faulty, wrong'st another's Fame, / Howe'er so great and dignify'd thy Name, / The Muse shall drag thee forth to publick Shame; / Pluck the fair Feathers from thy Swan-skin Heart, / And shew thee black and guileful as thou art."
preview | full record— Miller, James (1704-1744)
Date: 1742
"But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air, / Soon close; where pass'd the shaft, no trace is found. / As from the wing no scar the sky retains, / The parted wave no furrow from the keel, / So dies in human hearts the thought of death."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1744
"Beneath what baleful planet, in what hour / Of desperation, by what Fury's aid, / In what infernal posture of the soul, / All hell invited, and all hell in joy / At such a birth, a birth so near of kin, / Did thy foul fancy whelp so black a scheme / Of hopes abortive, faculties half-blown, / And...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1748, 1777
"If they tell me, that they have mounted on the steps or by the gradual ascent of reason, and by drawing inferences from effects to causes, I still insist, that they have aided the ascent of reason by the wings of imagination; otherwise they could not thus change their manner of inference, and ar...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1755
The "busy Statesman's mind" may grow putrid on the throne of power so that "Fresh vices spring up ev'ry hour; / As in dead corses serpents breed, / And loathsome, on corruption feed"
preview | full record— Derrick, Samuel (1724-1769)
Date: 1760-7
"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)