Date: Published serially, 1765-1770

"Thoughts of God and a Saviour would come into my Mind, and the pious Impressions of my Infancy would return upon me; but I did my best to banish them, as they served but to torment me."

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: 1766

"Far beyond the bonds of meaning / Fancy flies, a Fairy queen!"

— Cunningham, John (1729-1773)

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: 1763, 1767

"And lo a flourish'd portico enrich'd, / That wears th'embroidery of the Queen it guards, / Where Fancy on her vernal throne presides / O'er all the colours of the painted year, / That charm th'affections, and deceive the eye."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1767

"Be rul'd by reason for your beauty's sake."

— Murphy, Arthur (1727-1805)

Date: 1768

"Hope and fear alternate rising, / Strive for empire o'er my heart."

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

Date: 1768

"When the situation is, what we would wish, nothing is so ill-timed as to hint at the circumstances which make it so: you thank Fortune, continued she--you had reason--the heart knew it, and was satisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent notices of it to the brain to reverse th...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"In saying this, I was making not so much La Fleur's eloge, as my own, having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1774

"While awake, and in health, this busy principle [the imagination] cannot much delude us: it may build castles in the air, and raise a thousand phantoms before us; but we have every one of the senses alive, to bear testimony to its falsehood."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)