Date: 1761

"Wake my Harp! to melting Measures, / Pour thy softest, sweetest Treasures, / Such as lift the Thoughts on high; / 'Till the rapt Soul, Earth forsaking, / Heaven-ward it's Flight is taking, / On the Wings of Harmony."

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1762

"Therefore, I have no one notion, / That is not form'd, like the designing / Of the peristaltick motion; / Vermicular; twisting and twining; / Going to work / Just like a bottle-skrew upon a cork."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1763

"My heart was lighter than a fly, / Like any bird I sung, / Till he pretended love, and I, / Believed his flattering tongue."

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1766

"We are not to judge of the feelings of others by what we might feel if in their place. Howsoever dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet the animal itself finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome. And to confess a truth, this man's mind seems fitted to his station; for when he convers...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1766

"As a bird that had been frighted from its nest, my affections out-went my haste, and hovered around my little fire-side, with all the rapture of expectation."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1767

"Man in this world, Sir, may be compared to a hackney-coach upon a stand; continually subject to be drawn by his unruly appetites, on one foolish jaunt or another; but you will say, if his appetites are horses, which as it were drag him along, reason is the coachman to rule those horses--But, Sir...

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1772

Fancy may "mount the rapid Car, / And Judgement hold the Reins"

— Whyte, Samuel (1733-1811)

Date: 1775

"I'll wait till her just resentment is abated--and when I distress her so again, may I lose her for ever! and be linked instead to some antique virago, whose knawing passions, and long-hoarded spleen, shall make me curse my folly half the day, and all the night!"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Envy in courts and cottages will dwell, / Nay climb to heaven itself, tho' born in hell: / In every living bosom lurks this pest, / But reigns unrival'd in the human breast; / On reason's throne usurps a thorny part, / And plants a thousand daggers in the heart."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)