Date: 1747-8

"Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus; / While we, fantastic dreamers, heave and puff, / And sweat with our imagination's weight."

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1749

"These were Esteem and Pity; for sure the most outragiously rigid among her Sex will excuse her pitying a Man, whom she saw miserable on her own Account; nor can they blame her for esteeming one who visibly from the most honourable Motives, endeavoured to smother a Flame in his own Bosom, which, ...

— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)

Date: 1751

"Tears gushing again, my heart fluttering as a bird against its wires; drying my eyes again and again to no purpose."

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1759

"To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1773

"But reasoning with a man under the influence of any passion is like endeavouring to stop a wild horse, who becomes more violent from being pursued."

— Graves, Richard (1715-1804)

Date: 1793

"Her mind was a kind of circulating library in little, and I sincerely wish romances were always attended with the same good effects they produced in her; for there is scarcely a good moral inculcated by them that she did not act up to."

— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)

Date: 1794

"The slightest breath of dishonour would have stung him to the very soul"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1796

"The trial is dangerous; he is just at that period of life when the passions are most vigorous, unbridled, and despotic."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1796

"No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, he feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of ennui and weariness."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1796

"You know not the power of those irresistible, those fatal sentiments to which her heart was a prey."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)