Date: w. 1718 [first published 1907]

"All this says Richard is but Nonsense / For whats the Will without the Conscience / That mighty Pow'r by whom the thought / Is from Kings Bench to Chanc'ry brought. / What Seat for Her have You assign'd / When She may view and sway the mind?"

— Prior, Matthew (1664-1721)

Date: 1759

"Their [pedants'] poring upon black and white too subtly / Has turn'd the Insides of their Brains to motly."

— Butler, Samuel (1613-1680)

Date: 1759

"Their [pedants'] constant overstraining of the Mind / Distorts the Brain, as Horses break their Wind / Or rude Confusions of the Things they read / Get up, like noxious Vapours, in the Head, / Until they have their constant Wanes and Fulls, / And Changes in the Insides of their Skulls."

— Butler, Samuel (1613-1680)

Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

The judgment may mend the plan drawn by fancy

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1781

"[A]ll you've said / Seems to wear Reason's stamp."

— Keate, George (1729-1797)

Date: 1803

"He stammers,--instantaneously is drawn / A bordered piece of inspiration-lawn, / Which being thrice unto his nose applied, / Into his pineal gland the vapours glide; / And now again we hear the doctor roar / On subjects he dissected thrice before."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: 1803

"Though, when black melancholy damps my joys, / I call them nature's trifles, airy toys; / Yet when the goddess Reason guides the strain, / I think them, what they are, a heavenly train."

— Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind o...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)